Catherine the Great

For Catherine, however, the situation was different. She had been ready to engage in escapades like slipping out of the palace at night in male clothing. But she did not enjoy sitting down to supper with her gossip-loving husband and his saucy, malicious mistress, listening to their flighty conversation. It was not pleasant to see how much Elizabeth Vorontsova was enjoying the situation. Catherine was not cynical; she believed in love. The degrading of love, which pleased Peter, offended her. And she could not bear that Peter should consider Poniatowski as merely the male equivalent of Elizabeth Vorontsova. She regarded Poniatowski as a gentleman; Vorontsova she considered a trollop. Soon, a warning signal flashed in her mind. This nocturnal camaraderie was based on agreed, mutual adultery, and she realized that these episodes could spell a greater danger to her future than the hostility of the Shuvalovs. Even at the permissive court of Elizabeth, this arrangement between herself and Peter might be a barrier to her ambition. As Catherine feared, awareness of the ménage à quatre began to create a political scandal. L’Hôpital mentioned it when renewing his demands that Poniatowski be dismissed. Elizabeth understood that the reputation of her nephew and heir was being undermined. Poniatowski knew that he must go.

Saying goodbye, Catherine wept. With Poniatowski she had experienced the courtship of a gentle, cultured European. Afterward, her letters and his were filled with hope for a speedy reunion. Many years later, as empress of Russia, Catherine wrote to Gregory Potemkin, in whom she confided almost every detail about her previous life: “Poniatowski was loving and beloved from 1755 to 1758 and the liaison would have lasted forever if he himself had not got bored by it. On the day of his departure, I was more distressed than I can tell you. I don’t think I ever cried so much in my life.” In fact, Catherine’s blaming of boredom on his part was unfair. They both had recognized that the situation had become impossible.

Many years later, as king of Poland, placed on this throne by his former lover Empress Catherine II of Russia, Poniatowski included in his memoirs a brief sketch of Peter. It is a damning portrait, but it also has elements of understanding, even sympathy:

Nature made him a mere poltroon, a guzzler, an individual comic in all things. In one of the outpourings of his heart to me, he observed, “See how unhappy I am. If I had only entered into the service of the King of Prussia I would have served him to the best of my ability. By this present time, I should, I am confident, have had a regiment and the rank of major general and perhaps even of lieutenant general. But far from it. Instead, they brought me here and made me a grand duke of this damned country.” And then he railed against the Russian nation in his familiar, low, burlesque style, yet at times really very agreeably, for he did not lack a certain kind of spirit. He was not stupid, but mad, and as he loved to drink, this helped scramble his poor brains even further.

*Throughout the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) that followed, Russia and England were never at war, despite each being allied with the enemies of the other.

*For centuries, elevation to the Polish throne had been by election, with most of the Polish nobility preferring to submit to the weak rule of a foreign king than to sacrifice any of their own privileges by giving preference to one of their own blood. The result was permanent near anarchy.

The imperial coronation crown designed for Catherine. The crown was used in all six of the Romanov coronations that followed.

(RIA Novosti)

Prince Christian Augustus of Anhalt-Zerbst, father of Princess Sophia, who would become Catherine the Great

Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, Sophia’s mother

Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, who brought Sophia to Russia at fourteen and changed her name to Catherine. The empress then married the adolescent girl to her nephew, Peter, and charged her with immediately producing an infant to secure the dynasty.

(Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum; photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets)

Catherine at sixteen, at the Russian court

(Portrait of Grand Duchess Ekatrina Alekseyevna, later Catherine II, c. 1745 by Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49), Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Catherine and her new husband, who would become Emperor Peter III

(Portrait of Catherine the Great (1729–96) and Prince Petr Fedorovich (1728–62), 1740–45 (oil on canvas) by Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49), © Odessa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Portrait of Peter III

Stanislaus Poniatowski, Catherine’s second lover and later king of Poland, an office forced on him by Catherine