Catherine the Great

Then, on January 1, 1744, after a service in the castle chapel, the family had just sat down to New Year’s Day dinner when a courier brought a sealed letter for Johanna. She opened it immediately. It was from St. Petersburg and had been written by Otto Brümmer, grand marshal of the court of Peter Ulrich, the young Duke of Holstein, now heir apparent to the Russian throne. Brümmer wrote:

At the explicit command of Her Imperial Majesty [the Empress Elizabeth], I have to inform you, Madame, that the empress desires Your Highness, accompanied by the princess, your eldest daughter, to come to Russia as soon as possible and repair without loss of time to whatever place the Imperial Court may then be found. Your Highness is too intelligent not to understand the true meaning of the impatience of the empress to see you here soon as well as the princess your daughter of whom report has said much that is lovely. At the same time, our incomparable monarch has expressly charged me to inform Your Highness that His Highness the prince shall under no circumstances take part in the journey. Her Majesty has very important reasons for wishing it so. A word from Your Highness will, I believe, be all that is necessary to fulfill the will of our divine empress.

Brümmer’s letter contained other requests. He asked that Johanna travel incognito as far as Riga, on the Russian frontier, and that, if possible, she keep her destination a secret. If, somehow, the destination became known, she was to explain that duty and etiquette required her to thank the Russian empress personally for her generosity to the house of Holstein. To cover Johanna’s expenses, Brümmer enclosed a bill of exchange for ten thousand rubles on a Berlin bank. The letter did not specify the ultimate purpose of the summons, but a second letter, arriving by another courier only a few hours later, made the purpose clear. This letter came from Frederick II of Prussia and also was addressed only to Johanna:

I will no longer conceal the fact that in addition to the respect I have always cherished for you and for the princess your daughter, I have always had the wish to bestow some unusual good fortune upon the latter; and the thought came to me that it might be possible to arrange a match for her with her cousin, the Grand Duke Peter of Russia.

Brümmer’s specific exclusion of Prince Christian Augustus from the empress’s invitation, reinforced by Frederick’s having written only to Johanna, was, of course, humiliating for the nominal head of the family. And the wording of both letters made it clear that everyone involved seemed confident that the wife could manage to override whatever objections her stolid husband might raise, not only to his exclusion from the invitation but to other aspects of this possible marriage. These objections, they feared, would center on the requirement that a German princess marrying a future tsar would have to abandon her Protestant faith and convert to Greek Orthodoxy. Christian Augustus’s devout Lutheranism was well known, and all parties understood that he would oppose his daughter’s setting it aside.

For Johanna, this was a glorious day. After fifteen years of a depressing marriage, an empress and a king had put before her the prospect that all her dreams of excitement and adventure were to be realized. She was to be a person of importance, a performer on the world stage; all the heretofore wasted treasures of her personality were to be put to use. She was euphoric. As the days passed, messages from Russia and Berlin urging haste continued to arrive in Zerbst. In St. Petersburg, Brümmer, now under constant pressure from an impatient empress, told Elizabeth that Johanna had written that “she lacked only wings, otherwise she would fly to Russia.” And this was almost true: it took Johanna only ten days to make preparations for the journey.

While Sophia’s mother savored her crowning moment, her father secluded himself in his study. The old soldier had always known how to behave on a battlefield, but he did not know how to behave now. He resented his exclusion from the invitation, yet he wished to support his daughter. He abhorred the prospect of her being forced to change her religion, and was uneasy at the idea of her being sent far from home to a country as politically unstable as Russia. Ultimately, despite all these worries and reservations, the old, good soldier felt that he had no choice; he must listen to his wife and obey the orders of King Frederick II. He locked his study door and began composing cautionary advice to his daughter as to how she should behave at the Russian court:

Next to the empress, Her Majesty, you must respect the Grand Duke [Peter, her future husband] above all as your Lord, Father, and Sovereign; and withal win by care and tenderness at every opportunity his confidence and love. Your Lord and his will are to be preferred to all the pleasures and treasures of the world and nothing is to be done which he dislikes.