*4 The Panin fortunes were founded on marriage to the niece of Peter the Great’s favourite Prince Alexander Menshikov, who had started life as a pie-seller.
3
FIRST MEETING: THE EMPRESS’S RECKLESS SUITOR
The Horse-Guards came, in such a frenzy of joy as I have never seen, weeping and shouting that the country was free at last.
Catherine the Great to Stanislas Poniatowski, 2 August 1762
Of all the sovereigns of Europe, I believe the Empress of Russia is the richest in diamonds. She has a kind of passion for them; perhaps she has no other weaknesses…
Sir George Macartney on Catherine the Great
The newly acclaimed Catherine II, dressed raffishly in a borrowed green uniform of a captain of the Preobrazhensky Guards, appeared at the door of the Winter Palace on the night of 28 June 1762, accompanied by her entourage, and holding a naked sabre in her bare hands. In the blue incandescence of St Petersburg’s ‘white nights’, she walked down the outside steps into the crowded square and towards her thoroughbred grey stallion, who was named Brilliant. She swung into the saddle with the ease of a practised horsewoman – her years of frantic exercise had not been wasted.
The Guards, 12,000 who had rallied to her revolution, were massed around her in the square, ready to set off on ‘The March to Peterhof’ to overthrow Peter III. All of them must have peered at the thirty-three-year-old woman in her prime, with her long auburn hair, her bright-blue eyes, her black eyelashes, so at home in the Guardsman’s uniform, at the moment of the crucial drama of her life. Among them, Potemkin, on horseback in his Horse-Guards uniform, eagerly awaited any opportunity to distinguish himself.
The soldiers stiffened to attention with the Guards’ well-drilled pageantry – but the square was far from silent. It more resembled the bustling chaos of an encampment than the polished stiffness of a parade. The night resounded with clattering hooves, neighing horses, clinking spurs and swords, fluttering banners, the coughing, muttering and whispering of thousands of men. Many of the troops had been waiting there since the night before in a carnival atmosphere. Some of them were drunk – the taverns had been looted. The streets were littered with discarded Prussian-style uniforms, like the morning after a fancy-dress party. None of this mattered because every man knew he was changing history: they peered at the enchanting vision of this young woman they were making empress and the excitement of it must have touched all of them.
Catherine took Brilliant’s reins and was handed her sword, but she realized that she had forgotten to attach a
Princess Dashkova, also dressed dashingly in a Guardsman’s uniform, mounted her horse just behind the Empress. There was a distinct element of masquerade in this ‘petticoat revolution’. Now it was time to move in order to strike at dawn: Peter III was still at large and still emperor in name at Oranienbaum, a night’s march away. Yet Alcibiades was still beside the Empress.
Catherine took the