Love affairs of the Courts of Europe

by Thornton Hall

But troublous days were coming to break the idyll of their love. The Empress Elizabeth, as was inevitable, at last drank herself to death, and her nephew Peter, now a besotted imbecile of thirty-four, put on the Imperial robes, and was free to indulge his madness without restraint. The first use he made of his freedom was to subject his wife to every insult and humiliation his debased brain could suggest. He flaunted his amours and vices before her, taunted her in public with her own indiscretions, and shouted in his cups that he would divorce her.

Not content with these outrages on his Empress, he lost no opportunity of disgusting his subjects and driving his soldiers to the verge of mutiny. Such an intolerable state of things could only have one issue. The Emperor was undoubtedly mad; the Emperor must go.

Over the coup d'état which followed we must pass hurriedly—the conspiracy of Catherine and the Orloffs, the eager response of the army which flocked to the Empress, "kissing me, embracing my hands, my feet, my dress, and calling me their saviour"; the marching of the insurgent troops to Oranienbaum, with Catherine, astride on horseback, at their head; and Peter's craven submission, when he crawled on his knees to his wife, with whimpering and tears, begging her to allow him to keep "his mistress, his dog, his negro, and his violin."

The Emperor was safe behind barred doors at Mopsa; Catherine was now Empress in fact as well as name. Three weeks later Peter was dead; was he done to death by Catherine's orders? To this day none can say with certainty. The story of this tragedy as told by Castèra makes gruesome reading.

One day Alexis Orloff and Teplof appeared at Mopsa to announce to the deposed sovereign his approaching deliverance and to ask a dinner of him. Glasses and brandy were ordered, and while Teplof was amusing the Tsar, Orloff filled the glasses, adding poison to one of them.

"The Tsar, suspecting no harm, took the poison and swallowed it. He was soon seized with agonising pains. He screamed aloud for milk, but the two monsters again presented poison to him and forced him to take it. When the Tsar's valet bravely interposed he was hurled from the room. In the midst of the tumult there entered Prince Baratinski, who commanded the Guard. Orloff, who had already thrown down the Tsar, pressed upon his chest with his own knees, holding him fast at the same time by the throat. Baratinski and Teplof then passed a table-napkin with a sliding knot round his neck, and the murderers accomplished the work of death by strangling him."

Such is the story as it has come down to us, and as it was believed in Russia at the time. That Gregory Orloff was innocent of a crime in which his own brother played a leading part is as little to be credited as that Catherine herself was in ignorance of the design on her husband's life. But, however this may be, we are told that when the news of her husband's death was brought to the Empress at a banquet, she was to all appearance overcome with horror and grief. She left the table with streaming eyes and spent the next few days in unapproachable solitude in her rooms.

Thus at last Catherine was free both from the tyranny of Elizabeth and from the brutality of her bestial husband. She was sole sovereign of all the Russias, at liberty to indulge any caprice that entered her versatile brain. That her subjects, almost to a man, regarded her with horror as her husband's murderer, that this detestation was shared by the army that had put her on the throne, and by the nobles who had been her slaves, troubled her little. She was mistress of her fate, and strong enough (as indeed she proved) to hold, with a firm grasp, the sceptre she had won.

High as Gregory Orloff had stood in her favour before she came to her crown, his position was now more splendid and secure. She showered her favours on him with prodigal hand. Lands and jewels and gold were squandered on her "First Favourite"—the official designation she invented for him; and he wore on his broad chest her miniature in a blazing oval of diamonds, the crowning mark of her approval. And to his brothers she was almost equally generous, for in a few years of her ascendancy the Orloffs were enriched by vast estates on which forty-five thousand serfs toiled, by palaces, and by gold to the amount of seventeen million roubles. Such it was to be in the good books of Catherine II., Empress of Russia.

With riches and power, Gregory's ambition grew until he dreamt of sitting on the throne itself by Catherine's side; and in her foolish infatuation even this prize might have been his, had not wiser counsels come to her rescue. "The Empress," said Panine to her, "can do what she likes; but Madame Orloff can never be Empress of Russia." And thus Gregory's greatest ambition was happily nipped in the bud.