The heart and stomach of a king
Charlotte Hobson
CATHERINE THE GREAT: LOVE, SEX AND POWER by Virginia Rounding Hutchinson, £20, pp.592, ISBN 0091799929 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When Princess Sophie of AnhaltZerbst arrived at the Russian court in 1744, one of the many daughters of minor German royal houses who came to St Petersburg in the hope of an advantageous marriage, she was just 15 and ‘as ugly as a scarecrow’ after a severe illness. Her future husband, the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter, was a bizarre character whose main interests were his toy soldiers and ‘romping’ with his valets. No one, unsurprisingly, recognised in her the future Catherine II, one of Russia’s greatest rulers, who was to preside over a vast expansion of Russian territory, the flourishing of St Petersburg, the huge collection of European art and sculpture that formed the basis of the Hermitage, the reform of local government, law and education, not to mention a procession of ever younger and more delectable lovers. How did she do it? In this entertaining new biography, Virginia Rounding explores ‘Catherine as a woman’, the character and passions that sustained this extraordinary life.
Sophie, who took the name Catherine on being baptised into the Orthodox Church, was first of all patient. Eighteen years passed before she came to the throne, years of which she later wrote, ‘After the dogs, I was the most miserable creature in the world.’ After seven years of marriage, her ‘child-husband’ had still not got round to the business of consummation. Finally an attendant arranged that Catherine take her first lover, bloodlines being less important than healthy little heirs. A son duly appeared.
Discreet, determined, and with all the innate understanding of politics that her husband lacked, Catherine made it her business to charm everyone. A year after the ascendancy of her husband, Peter III, she was already plotting to overthrow him. In June 1762, she was woken in the middle of the night by the news that one of her conspirators had been arrested and the coup must take place at once. She left the palace in such a hurry that only a lucky meeting with her French hairdresser, who jumped into her carriage and arranged her hair as they sped towards the Ismailovsky regiment, avoided the scene of Catherine, Empress of All the Russias, receiving the oath of allegiance in her lace nightcap.
Peter did not resist. Arrested in his palace of Peterhof, it was said of him later that he ‘allowed himself to be dethroned like a child being sent to bed’. A week later Peter was dead, strangled by his guards. It looked fishy, whether Catherine was complicit in the murder or not. All her efforts to bring Russia into the Age of Enlightenment could never quite rid her of the stain of regicide.
Catherine took to power with alacrity. Clever, diligent and well-read from her years of preparation, she was an empress who astonished her Senate by actually joining in their sessions. She, in turn, was horrified to discover the senators’ ignorance of the country they were governing. One of her first instructions to them was to obtain a map of Russia from the Academy of Sciences.
She soon established a strict timetable of work: starting at six in the morning, she worked for many years on a new Codification of the Laws, which had not been overhauled for a century, met her ministers and other petitioners, read, and kept up with her vast correspondence with Voltaire and Diderot, among others. Her letters reveal a witty, cheerful, sensible woman, who did not stand on ceremony — or not all the time. Writing to the sculptor, Falconet, who has asked for her opinion of one of his works, she says disarmingly, ‘I cannot even draw; [yours] will be perhaps the first good statue which I will have seen in my life; how can you content yourself with such a slender judgment?’ Essential to her happiness was a current ‘favourite’, of whom she had, I think, ten during the course of her 30-year reign. ‘The trouble is that my heart is loth to remain even one hour without love,’ she wrote. She was not as capricious as this makes her sound; most of her lovers were seen off by court intrigues. Her practice of loading each one with not only rank and wealth but political power made this almost inevitable. Only Potemkin, whom she may have secretly married (although Rounding thinks not), retained his position after their first passion had waned. Catherine relied on him as a member of her government, and in a brilliantly pragmatic move he provided her with young, handsome officers, thus solving the matter of her heart and preserving his status in one move.
As Catherine grew older, her letters suggest some English country lady, kind, bossy and brisk, with a passion for her grandchildren and her dogs. Her lovers, by this time a good 30 years her junior, are described in the same nannyish tones as her grandchildren: ‘We are beneficent, cheerful, honest and very sweet.’ The ‘horse story’ — that she was squashed beneath a stallion — was a malicious rumour, as this book is at pains to point out. In fact Catherine the Great died of a stroke on the lavatory, like Elvis.
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