The Romance of the Romanoffs

by Joseph McCabe

To the people at large, when the last fireworks had been discharged, the burden of the war was a new grievance. Anne was not without shrewdness. She contrived to wring from the impoverished people even the arrears of taxes, which the frivolity of the late administration had allowed to accumulate, without ever confronting a serious threat to her rule. But her careful and generally intelligent government was guilty of one extravagance which further angered the people. She loved pomp and display, and she gradually impressed upon her court and aristocracy a standard of living, especially of dressing, which threatened many with ruin.

The court returned in 1732 to St. Petersburg, and Biren and she attempted to give it the elegance and splendour of the first courts of Europe. Neither had at first much refinement of taste, and foreign visitors described with amused disdain the veneer of display on the lingering barbarism of Russia. New uniforms of the most gaudy character were supplied to the guard and the servants of the court. The nobles were compelled to spend what seemed to Russians colossal sums in bringing themselves up to the new standard, and a bewigged and bepowdered crowd, in dazzling blue or green or pink silks and satins, replaced the sober-clad boyars of earlier years. Banquets and balls followed each other in rapid succession, and new dresses must adorn each occasion; while it is said that the demand for the services of the elaborate hair-dressers was such that ladies had at times to have their hair dressed two or three days in advance and carefully preserve the structure until the evening of the ball.

In her later years Anne, perhaps taught by the pungent criticisms of foreign guests, developed a sober taste. She was a very tall woman, of large and not ungraceful build, with grave dark blue eyes and black hair. In her later years she exchanged her bright blues and greens for gold brocade or brown silk, her diamonds for pearls; and her officers had black and yellow liveries, embroidered with silver braid. She did much to raise the taste of Russia. Although champagne was now introduced into Russia, she frowned upon the ancient daily habit of intoxication. Only on one day of the year—the anniversary of her coronation—did she tolerate heavy drinking. She introduced also a certain lightness and elegance into open-air feasts, which had in Peter’s day been orgies of drink and roughness, and she insisted on better manners at table. It was not long since, at a Russian dinner, one plate had had to serve a guest through the long and varied series of courses—the punctilious man wiped his plate with his finger or napkin, or poured the gravy on to the floor—and a servant had torn scraps of linen or calico off a roll for the use of those who desired napkins. Into the state of such rooms when the doors were locked for many hours, as they often were, the polite modern must not inquire too closely. A good deal of this grossness lingered in Russia, and Anne set her face against it.

She—the earlier lover of Besthuzeff and Biren—was not less warmly opposed to laxity of morals. Moderate gambling she herself introduced and encouraged, but the young folk whom she liked to have about her had to be careful. When Elizabeth did not reform her free ways, after a few lovers had been sent to Siberia, she was threatened with a convent. Anne’s favourite was a niece. Princess Anne of Mecklenburg, an insipid, good-natured girl whom she was preparing for the throne. The Saxon envoy, Count Lynar, was discovered in too close a relation to this young lady, and was sent back to Saxony; whence we shall find him return as soon as the Tsarina is dead and his lover is on the throne.

In other respects the character of Anne was at the lowest Romanoff level. She not only delighted in the dwarfs and buffoons, and the rough knock-about comedies, which had always been popular at the court, but she found pleasure in refinements of cruelty which Peter would have thought unchivalrous. She would rock with laughter when her dwarfs got to bloody noses in their cock-fights, and she sank to the depth of compelling noble men and women who incurred her anger to enter these vulgar troops and provide the most puerile amusement. A noble of merit was condemned to this disgraceful service because Anne hated his wife; another because he joined the Roman Church. But the most curious and brutal of all her whims was her treatment of a noble of the great Golitzuin family.

The man had travelled in Italy and married a Roman Catholic. He was forty years old and of high birth, yet he was compelled to enter the company of Anne’s pages and buffoons. When his wife at length died, Anne said that she would choose a second for him, and she selected a coarse and ugly Kalmuck woman from the uncivilised fringe of her Empire. The wedding must be not merely public, but of a nature to attract the attention of the whole of Russia to his disgrace, and specimens of all the backward peoples of the Empire were summoned to it. A long procession of Finns, Lapps, Samoyedes, etc., riding in carts drawn by pigs or reindeer or other unusual animals, preceded the miserable groom and his bride, who rode on an elephant, to the church. All St. Petersburg turned out to see it. In the evening a large banquet was served to the guests, and the wedded pair then went to the house which had been made for them. It was the month of February, and a house had been cut out of solid ice. Cannons of ice exploded at the door, all the furniture was of ice, and the unfortunate noble and his hideous companion were enclosed for the night in a room, and upon a bed, of naked ice. This was in the very year of the Empress’s death.

Anne was scarcely less to blame for the conduct of her favourite. While Russia groaned under her taxes, his wealth grew to a colossal fortune. His wife’s diamonds alone were valued at three million rubles. His stables, his plate, his palaces, were amongst the most superb in Europe. This wealth was notoriously amassed by corruption and protected by a system of spies and bullies. In his Duchy of Courland, which he obtained in 1737 by bribing the electors, his name spelt terror to the poor folk from whom he had sprung. In Russia itself he ruled by the knout and the executioner. In 1739 he felt that the Dolgorukis were not quite beyond the power of making mischief, if the Empress died, and he dragged them from their exiles and had a fresh trial. One was broken on the wheel, two were beheaded, and others were imprisoned for life. In the following year he was insulted in the Council by a certain Voluinsky, whom he had adopted, but who had turned against him. The man must be broken or he would himself leave the country, he told the Empress. She sadly consented, and the man was taken to a scaffold which bore instruments so horrible that his robust nerve gave way. At the last moment the Empress benevolently commuted his sentence; he merely lost his right hand and his head. His companions lost their heads or their tongues, or joined the melancholy colony in Siberia.

In the summer of 1740 the Princess Anne, who had married Prince Anthony of Brunswick-Bevern, bore a son, and, as Anne’s health failed, the feverish dispute about the succession reopened. It was understood that this infant was to be nominated Tsar, and the natural course would be to make his parents the Regents. Biren, however, took care to have himself nominated for the Regency, and he pressed the Empress, whose end was in sight, to endorse the arrangement. She refused for some days, but on October 26th she signed the document, and two days later she died.

Another, and still stranger romance, was now to be added to the weird chronicle of the court of the Romanoffs. Anne of Mecklenburg was the daughter of the late Empress’s elder sister, who had, we saw, been a daughter of Peter the Great’s elder brother. She seems to have been very unlike the other members of the family, though her mother had been a quiet and temperate princess. Anne herself was a blonde, good-natured nonentity; a pawn in the game played by her elders. Prince Anthony, who had even less intelligence and character than she, had been brought young from Austria, and trained for his marital and royal duties under the eye of the late Empress. His wife disdained him, and Biren, seeing her dislike before they were married, suggested that she should marry instead his fifteen-year-old son. This proposal she rejected even more vehemently, and in the summer of 1739 she had coldly given her hand to Anthony.

Biren perceived the delicacy of his position, and he tried, by concessions to the troops and a reduction of the extravagance which the late Empress had imposed, to conciliate the country. But from the first day of his Regency a sullen murmur rose about him and gathered volume. Prince Anthony was the first to rebel. It was, he said, infamous to exclude him from the Regency when his son was Tsar; but when Biren brought him before an assembly of the nobles he saw the shadow of the scaffold and broke into hysterical tears. He was relieved of his appointments and ordered to confine himself to his wife’s apartments. Anne herself then murmured, and Biren threatened to retain the babe, and send her and her husband to Mecklenburg.