Catherine the Great

At fifteen, she was considered ready for marriage. From the time of Peter the Great’s visit to Paris in 1717, the great tsar had hoped to marry Elizabeth to Louis XV, who was two months younger than she. Elizabeth had been schooled with this marriage in mind. She was taught the French language and court manners along with French history and literature. Campredon, the French ambassador to St. Petersburg, wholeheartedly endorsed the tsar’s plan: “There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth,” he wrote to Paris. “It may be said that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded.” Yet despite this recommendation and the girl’s manifest charms, at Versailles her credentials were tarnished: her mother was a peasant, and the daughter may have been born out of wedlock. France did not want a bastard on or near the throne.

Peter’s hope for Elizabeth was thwarted, but one of his two daughters was to marry. In 1721, when Elizabeth was not quite twelve and Anne was thirteen, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, the only nephew of Peter the Great’s legendary adversary Charles XII of Sweden, had come to St. Petersburg. When King Charles had died, the duke had been displaced in Stockholm as heir to his dead uncle’s throne.

In Russia, Peter welcomed the young man with a pension and a place of honor. To further advance his own cause, the duke began to pay court to Elizabeth’s sister Anne. Four years later, when Anne was seventeen—and despite Anne’s lack of enthusiasm for this suitor—the couple were betrothed in a service in which the emperor himself took rings from each partner and exchanged them with the other. Then, suddenly, on January 25, 1725, Peter the Great, fifty-two years old, died. Anne’s wedding was postponed while her mother assumed the throne as Empress Catherine I. On May 21, four months after her father’s death, Anna married Charles Frederick. Her fifteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, was her bridesmaid.

The death of Peter the Great and the marriage of his daughter Anne plunged the already complicated Russian succession into greater confusion. In a decree in February 1722, Peter had denounced as a dangerous practice, unfounded in scripture, the rule of male primogeniture, the ancient, time-honored sequence by which the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the Russian tsars had passed down the throne from father to eldest son. Henceforth, Peter declared, every reigning sovereign would have the power to designate his or her successor. Following his proclamation, Peter placed a crown on Catherine’s head and declared her empress.

Her father’s early death profoundly affected Elizabeth’s future. The prospect of a brilliant match for Elizabeth became remote. Her mother still hoped for a French marriage, but Louis XV had married a Polish princess. At this point in St. Petersburg, Elizabeth’s new brother-in-law, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, began praising the merits of his twenty-year-old cousin, Prince Charles Augustus of Holstein (who happened to be a brother of Princess Johanna of Anhalt-Zerbst). Catherine I, who was fond of her son-in-law, agreed to invite this second young Holstein nobleman to Russia.

Charles Augustus reached St. Petersburg on October 16, 1726, and made a favorable impression. Elizabeth saw him as the kinsman of her adored older sister’s husband, which made it easy for her to fall in love. The engagement announcement had been set for January 6, 1727, when Empress Catherine I was stricken by a series of chills and fevers. The ceremony was postponed until she recovered. The empress did not recover; instead, she grew worse, and in April, after reigning only twenty-seven months, she died. In May, only a month after her mother’s death, Elizabeth decided to go ahead with her marriage. Then, on May 27, on the eve of her engagement announcement, her prospective husband, Charles Augustus, was stricken; several hours later, the doctors diagnosed smallpox; four days later, he, too, was dead. Elizabeth, her happiness shattered at seventeen, cherished his memory for the rest of her life—although as her hopes for a conventional marriage slipped away, her sadness did not prevent her from seeking consolation with other men.