Secret Lives of the Tsars (12 page)

Peter III (1762): “Nature Made Him a Mere Poltroon”

Never did two minds resemble each other less.

—E
MPRESS
C
ATHERINE
II
ON HER HUSBAND
P
ETER
III

Soon after her accession to the Russian throne in 1742, Empress Elizabeth sought to secure the dynasty by bringing to Russia the last of Peter the Great’s grandsons, also named Peter, from the German duchy of Holstein. Alas, the young man—son of Elizabeth’s late sister Anne—was nothing like his esteemed namesake. Rather, he was a stunted simpleton with a loathing of all things Russian who would one day be usurped by the wife Elizabeth selected for him, the future empress Catherine the Great
.

The late empress Elizabeth, dressed regally in one of her fifteen thousand gowns, lay motionless in her coffin, her painted face a mask of perfect impassivity, as her fool of a successor, Peter III, created a spectacle of himself right in front of her. He “made faces, acted the buffoon, and imitated poor old ladies,” his mistress’s sister noted. And that’s when Peter even bothered to interrupt the raucous celebrations of his newfound power to pay tribute to his deceased aunt like the rest of Russia. His asinine behavior only grew more pronounced
during the funeral procession, as Peter entertained himself with a little game, described by his wife Catherine:

“He loitered behind the hearse, on purpose, allowing it to proceed at a distance of thirty feet, then he would run to catch up with it as fast as he could. The elder courtiers, who were carrying his black train, found themselves unable to keep up with him and let the train go. The wind blew it out and all this amused Peter III so much that he repeated the joke several times, so that I and everybody else remained far behind and had to stop the ceremony until everybody had caught up with the hearse. Criticism of the Emperor’s outrageous behavior spread rapidly and his unsuitable deportment was the subject of much talk.”

Soon enough, talk would turn into action, and Peter III would no longer be laughing. His wife made certain of that.

In the annals of rotten royal marriages, of which there were legion, that of Peter and Catherine would surely rank among the most miserable. Although both spouses—second cousins—were born in Germany and imported to Russia as teenagers, that’s about all they had in common. He was a sniveling, underdeveloped nincompoop—even if his worst qualities may have been a bit exaggerated by Catherine in her
Memoirs
*
1
—while she was an avid student of the Enlightenment, with ambitions that extended far beyond her designated role as a royal baby breeder. It was a toxic pairing that would end triumphantly for one and rather grimly for the other.

Peter came to the marriage with quite a few deficits, not the least of which was the brutal upbringing that warped him immeasurably. His mother, Peter the Great’s elder daughter Anne, died just three months after giving birth to him, and his father, Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein, showed very little interest in the boy before dying himself when Peter was eleven. Deprived of any parental love or affection, the young prince was raised instead by a borderline sadist, Otto Brümmer, who terrorized the small, sickly child. Whenever Peter failed in his studies or any other task, which was often enough, Brümmer was quick to humiliate him by making him wear the picture of an ass around his neck, or depriving him of food, or applying one of his favorite methods of torture, which was to make the boy kneel for hours on hard dried peas. The inevitable product of this hideous regime was an emotionally stunted, deceitful boy with a lifelong aversion to learning and a penchant for torturing animals.

Already damaged beyond repair, Peter was fourteen when his aunt, Empress Elizabeth, beckoned him to Russia in 1742 to become her adopted heir. As she quickly discovered, he was not a promising choice. Scrawny, with protuberant eyes and no chin, Peter was, alas, as dumb as he looked. Appalled by her nephew’s ignorance, Elizabeth promptly retained Professor Jacob von Staehlin of the Imperial Academy of Sciences to tutor him. “I see that Your Highness has still a great many pretty things to learn,” she gently said to Peter, “and Monsieur Staehlin here will teach them to you in such a pleasant manner that it will be a mere pastime for you.”

But it was no use. Peter was “utterly frivolous” and “altogether unruly,” Staehlin reported. He also steadfastly refused to become Russianized, disdaining the language and customs of the country he was destined to rule. Upon his grudging
conversion from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, Elizabeth raised her nephew to the rank of Imperial Highness and granted him the title of grand duke. She also made him a lieutenant colonel in the elite Preobrazhensky Guards, founded by his grandfather, Peter the Great. None of this made a bit of difference, however. Young Peter’s heart was in Holstein and there it would remain. The best the empress could hope for was that her nephew would produce an heir to carry on the Romanov dynasty. And for the unenviable task of mating with him, she brought to Russia Peter’s German cousin—the future Catherine the Great.

She was born Sophia Augusta Fredericka, the daughter of Prince Christian Augustus, ruler of the tiny German duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst, and his socially ambitious wife, Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. Sophia wasn’t warmly welcomed into the world on May 2, 1729—at least by her mother, who made no effort to disguise her epic disappointment that the little princess wasn’t the son she wanted and expected after a life-threatening delivery.

“My mother did not pay much attention to me,” Sophia (eventually rechristened Catherine) wrote in her
Memoirs
. “A year and a half later, she gave birth to a son whom she idolized. I was merely tolerated and often I was scolded with a violence and anger I did not deserve. I felt this without being perfectly clear why in my mind.”

It was not just her daughter’s sex that aggravated Johanna, but her looks as well. She deemed Sophia ugly, a genuine liability when one hoped to advance their standing through the European royal marriage market. Neither did she give the girl credit for her lively intelligence and engaging personality. In fact, these attributes were dismissed as arrogance. Yet despite all the deficits she perceived in her daughter, Johanna did
drag Sophia along on her endless rounds of visits to the other royal families of Germany, including her own, hoping to make some kind of advantageous match for her. She only dared dream that it would be someone as illustrious as the grandson of Peter the Great.

When the unexpected call came from Russia requesting fourteen-year-old Sophia’s presence there, Johanna was ecstatic. How this union between her daughter and the Russian heir would add to her own luster! Wasting not a minute, she immediately heeded the invitation to her glorious future—undeterred by the winter conditions that would make the journey to Russia treacherous, nor by the pesky fact that this trip really wasn’t about her.

Before embarking, Johanna was asked by Frederick II of Prussia to visit him in Berlin. The king, then at war with Austria, had promoted the match between Sophia and Peter with the hope that it would help keep neighboring Russia neutral in the conflict. He was eager, therefore, to meet the young princess upon whom a key part of his foreign policy depended. But Johanna arrived at King Frederick’s court unaccompanied by Sophia, who, she feared, might dim her own star. It was not until the king finally insisted that Johanna relented and brought her daughter along. Frederick was enchanted.

“The little princess of Zerbst combines the gaiety and spontaneity natural to her age with intelligence and wit surprising in one so young,” the king, known to history as Frederick the Great, wrote to his fellow monarch, Empress Elizabeth.

Much to her delight, Johanna wasn’t completely ignored in the equation. Frederick gave the self-important princess the mission to be his secret agent at the Russian court, and to undermine as best she could Elizabeth’s staunchly anti-Prussian
vice chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who vigorously opposed the proposed marriage of the German Sophia to the German Grand Duke Peter. It was a task Johanna relished, but one that would end disastrously for her and nearly ruin her daughter.

After an arduous wintertime trek across Russia—made, by the empress’s command, with their identities and purpose concealed, only a bare staff of servants to support them, and relegated to increasingly squalid accommodations along the way—Johanna and Sophia finally arrived in St. Petersburg in February 1744, to a thunderous welcome. “Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me … as if it all were only a dream,” Johanna wrote to her husband, Prince Christian, who had not been invited to Russia.

Johanna was clearly in her element, but for Sophia, her future was at that moment miles away in Moscow, where Empress Elizabeth and Grand Duke Peter had departed several weeks earlier and now awaited her. It was suggested to Johanna and Sophia that it would be pleasing to the empress if they timed their arrival in Moscow to coincide with Peter’s upcoming sixteenth birthday, on February 21. Accordingly, they set off in a grand cavalcade of thirty sledges.

Peter seemed genuinely pleased to see his German relatives when they arrived at Moscow’s Golovin Palace, greeting them with a goofy grin and chatting incessantly. He then took Johanna by the arm, while the Prince of Hesse-Homburg took Sophia’s, and led them through a series of glittering passages to meet the empress.

Mother and daughter were awed by the tall, robust figure standing before them in her silver gown, shimmering in diamonds, with a black feather perched at the side of her head—such
a contrast to the puny, pale-faced heir. Elizabeth greeted her visitors warmly, visibly moved by the sight of Johanna, who so closely resembled her brother, the empress’s deceased fiancé, Charles Augustus of Holstein. And she seemed delighted with Sophia, the young princess upon whom all her hopes for the future rested. She showered the girl with gifts and embraced her—at least for a time—with the kind of maternal love Sophia had never known. Peter, on the other hand, was decidedly less enamored. Sophia would suit him well as a playmate, but he was not at all interested in having her as a wife.

“I was in my fifteenth year and he showed himself very assiduous for the first ten days,” Sophia wrote in her
Memoirs
. “In that short space of time I saw and understood that he cared but little for the nation over which he was destined to rule, that he clung to Lutheranism, that he had no affection for those about him and that he was very much a child. I kept silent and listened, which helped to gain his confidence. I remember he told me among other things that what he liked most in me was that I was his second cousin and in that capacity, as a relative, he could talk freely with me; after this he confided that he was in love with one of the Empress’s ladies-in-waiting who had been expelled from Court … he would have liked to marry her, but he had resigned himself to marrying me as his aunt wished it. I listened to these disclosures with a blush, thanked him for his premature confidence, but privately observed with astonishment his imprudence on a number of matters.”

Sophia willingly joined with Peter in his silly games. She was still a child herself, after all, so these simpleminded pastimes with her future spouse were not too troubling. Plus, she wanted to please Peter. It was an imperative emphasized to
her by her father before she left Germany, and one upon which she believed her future ambitions absolutely depended. “I was the confidante of his childish nonsense,” she wrote, “and it was not for me to correct him; I let him do and say what he pleased.” Thus, when the odious Otto Brümmer, who had accompanied Peter to Russia and continued to torment him, asked Sophia to intervene and guide the grand duke to nobler pursuits, she refused. “I told him that it was impossible for me to do so, and that if I tried, I would become as hateful to him as all the others around him.”

Indulging her future spouse in all his inanities was one thing, but Sophia was wise enough to recognize that she also had to please Empress Elizabeth, as well as the rest of the nation. To that end, she set out to make herself thoroughly Russian. Unlike Peter, who stubbornly resisted learning the language and rejected the national religion, Sophia became an avid student. Indeed, she worked so hard that her health declined and she came down with a case of pneumonia that nearly killed her. Yet it was an illness that turned into a triumph.

The doctors tending Sophia insisted she be bled to alleviate her symptoms. But to this Johanna strenuously objected. Her brother had died after being bled while suffering from smallpox and she was terrified of the procedure—not to mention how her daughter’s death might adversely affect her own prospects. “There I lay with a high fever between my mother and the doctors arguing,” Sophia wrote. “I could not help groaning, for which I was scolded by my mother who expected me to suffer in silence.” It was then that Empress Elizabeth intervened, berating Johanna for daring interfere with her own doctors and kicking her out of the sickroom. Elizabeth then nursed Sophia herself, tending to her with the kind
of maternal devotion that Johanna seemed incapable of providing.

At one point, when it looked as though Sophia might die, Johanna insisted that a Lutheran minister be brought to her. But the ailing princess requested an Orthodox priest instead. “This raised me in the eyes of the Empress and of the whole Court,” she recalled.

While Sophia basked in the approbation she received for her diligent efforts to become Russian—and especially her reliance on an Orthodox rather than Lutheran confessor during her time of peril—her mother nearly ruined everything. Almost as soon as Johanna arrived in Russia earlier that year, she had begun conspiring against Bestuzhev-Ryumin with the French and Prussian ambassadors, just as King Frederick II had instructed. It was a fool’s endeavor, which Bestuzhev-Ryumin quickly uncovered through intercepted letters and duly reported to the empress. Elizabeth was wild with rage at this scheming, ungrateful woman whom she had welcomed so generously and even granted membership in the prestigious Order of St. Catherine. Johanna was in disgrace, and it looked like her daughter was as well.