CHAPTER VIII 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.