Catherine had adhered to her husband’s policy of a Prussian alliance. While Frederick the Great lived she was impressed by his ability. But the Prussian alliance became hateful to her, and her later correspondence with Grimm overflows with contempt of his successor Frederick William II., who is always spoken of by her as “Brother Gu.” Her exasperation with the affectations of the Prussian king was unquestionably increased by her discovery that he would not be induced to apply himself to a crusade against the French Revolution, which by employing all his forces would have left Russia free to annex the whole of what remained of Poland. But at least she did not enter into a solemn engagement to defend the Poles who were engaged in reforming their constitution, and then throw them over in order to share in the plunder of their country.
Catherine’s Turkish policy was at first marked by a certain grandiosity. When the Turks declared war in 1768 in order to support Poland, which they looked upon as a necessary buffer state, she retaliated by the great Greek scheme. For a time it was a pet idea with her to revive the Greek empire, and to plant the cross, with the double-headed Russian eagle, at Constantinople. She formed a corps of Greek cadets, caused her younger grandson to be christened Constantine, and began the policy of presenting Russia to the Christian subjects of the Porte as their deliverer. In pursuit of this heroic enterprise, which excited the loud admiration of Voltaire, she sent a fleet under Alexis Orlov into the Mediterranean in 1770. Orlov tempted the Greeks of the Morea to take up arms, and then left them in the lurch. When Catherine found herself opposed by the policy of France and England, and threatened by the jealousy of Prussia and Austria, she dropped the Greek design, observing to Voltaire that the descendants of the Spartans were much degenerated. The introduction into the treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji of 1774 of a clause by which the Porte guaranteed the rights of its Christian subjects, and of another-giving Russia the right to interfere on behalf of a new Russian church in Constantinople, advertised the claim of the tsars to be the natural protectors of the Orthodox in the Ottoman dominions; but when she took up arms again in 1788 in alliance with Joseph II. (q.v.), it was to make a mere war of conquest and partition. The Turkish wars show the weak side of Catherine as a ruler. Though she had mounted the throne by a military revolt and entered on great schemes of conquest, she never took an intelligent interest in her army. She neglected it in peace, allowed it to be shamefully administered in war, and could never be made to understand that it was not in her power to improvise generals out of her favourites. It is to her credit that she saw the capacity of Suvarov, yet she never had as much confidence in him as she had in Potemkin, who may have been a man of genius, but was certainly no general. She took care never to have to deal with a disciplined opponent, except the Swedes, who beat her, but who were very few.
It was the misfortune of Catherine that she lived too long. She disgraced herself by living with her last lover, Zubov, when she was a woman of sixty-seven, trusting him with power and lavishing public money on him. The outbreak of the French Revolution stripped off the varnish of philosophy and philanthropy which she had assumed in earlier years. She had always entertained a quiet contempt for the French writers whom she flattered and pensioned, and who served her as an advertising agency in the west. When the result of their teaching was seen in Paris, good-natured contempt was turned to hatred. She then became a persecutor in her own dominions of the very ideas she had encouraged in former years. She scolded and preached a crusade, without, however, departing from the steady pursuit of her own interests in Poland, while endeavouring with transparent cunning to push Austria and Prussia into an invasion of France with all their forces. Her health began to break down, and it appears to be nearly certain that towards the end she suffered from hysteria of a shameful kind. It is plain that her intellect had begun to fail just before her death, for she allowed the reigning favourite, Platon Zubov, to persuade her to despatch his brother Valerian, with the rank of field marshal and an army of 20,000 men, on a crack-brained scheme to invade India by way of Persia and Tibet. The refusal of the king of Sweden to marry into her family unless the bride would become a Lutheran is said to have thrown her into a convulsion of rage which hastened her death. On the 9th of November 1796, she was seized by a fit of apoplexy, and died on the evening of the 10th.
All other accounts of Catherine II. have been superseded by Waliszewski’s two volumes, Le Roman d’une impératrice (Paris, 1893) and Autour d’un Trône: Catherine II., ses collaborateurs, ses amis, ses favoris (Paris, 1894). The original sources for the history of her policy and her character are to be found in the publications of the Imperial Russian Historical Society, vols. i.-cix. (St Petersburg), begun in 1867; her private and official correspondence will be found in vols. i., ii., iv., v., vi., vii., viii., ix., x., xiii., xiv., xv., xvii., xx., xxiii., xxxii., xxxiii., xxxvi., xlii., xliii., xlvii., xlviii., li., lvii., lxvii., lxviii., lxxxvii., xcvii., xcviii., cvii., cxv., cxviii.
CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI (1519-1589), queen of France, the wife of one French king and the mother of three, was born at Florence in 1519. She was a daughter of Lorenzo II. de’ Medici and a French princess, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne. Having lost both her parents at an early age, Catherine was sent to a convent to be educated; and she was only fourteen when she was married (1533) at Marseilles to the duke of Orléans, afterwards Henry II. It was her uncle, Pope Clement VII., who arranged the marriage with Francis I. Francis, still engaged in his lifelong task of making head against Charles V., was only too glad of the opportunity to strengthen his influence in the Italian peninsula, while Clement, ever needful of help against his too powerful protector, was equally ready to hold out a bait. During the reign of Francis, Catherine exercised no influence in France. She was young, a foreigner, a member of a state that had almost no weight in the great world of politics, had not given any proof of great ability, and was thrown into the shade by more important persons. For ten years after her marriage she had no children. In consequence, a divorce began to be talked of at court; and it seemed not impossible that Francis, alarmed at the possible extinction of the royal house, might listen to such a proposal. But Catherine had the happiness of bringing him grandchildren ere he died. During the reign of her husband, too (1547-1559), Catherine lived a quiet and passive, but observant life. Henry being completely under the influence of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, she had little authority. In 1552, when the king left the kingdom for the campaign of Metz, she was nominated regent, but with very limited powers. This continued even after the accession of her son Francis II. Francis was under the spell of Mary Stuart, and she, little disposed to meddle with politics on her own account, was managed by her uncles, the cardinal of Lorraine and the duke of Guise. The queen-mother, however, soon grew weary of the domination of the Guises, and entered upon a course of secret opposition. On the 1st of April 1560 she placed in the chancellorship Michel de l’Hôpital (q.v.), who advocated the policy of conciliation.
On the death of Francis (5th of December 1560), Catherine became regent during the minority of her second son, Charles IX., and now found before her a career worthy of the most soaring ambition. She was then forty-one years old, but, although she was the mother of nine children, she was still very vigorous and active. She retained her influence for more than twenty years in the troubled period of the wars of religion. At first she listened to the moderate counsels of l’Hôpital in so far as to avoid siding definitely with either party, but her character and the habits of policy to which she had been accustomed, rendered her incapable of any noble aim. She had only one virtue, and that was her zeal for the interests of her children, especially of her favourite third son, the duke of Anjou. Like so many of the Italians of that time, who were almost destitute of a moral sense, she looked upon statesmanship in particular as a career in which finesse, lying and assassination were the most admirable, because the most effective weapons. By habit a Catholic, but above all things fond of power, she was determined to prevent the Protestants from getting the upper hand, and almost equally resolved not to allow them to be utterly crushed, in order to use them as a counterpoise to the Guises. This trimming policy met with little success: rage and suspicion so possessed men’s minds, that she could no longer control the opposing parties, and one civil war followed another to the end of her life. In 1567, after the “Enterprise of Meaux,” she dismissed l’Hôpital and joined the Catholic party. But, having failed to crush the Protestant rebellion by arms, she resumed in 1570 the policy of peace and negotiation. She conceived the project of marrying her favourite son, the duke of Anjou, to Queen Elizabeth of England, and her daughter Margaret to Henry of Navarre. To this end she became reconciled with the Protestants, and allowed Coligny to return to court and to re-enter the council. Of this step she quickly repented. Charles IX. conceived a great affection for the admiral and showed signs of taking up an independent attitude. Catherine, thinking her influence menaced, sought to regain it, first by the murder of Coligny, and, when that had failed, by the massacre of St Bartholomew (q.v.). The whole of the responsibility for this crime, therefore, rests with Catherine; unlike the populace, she had not even the excuse of fanaticism. This responsibility, however, weighed but lightly on her; while her son was overwhelmed with remorse, she calmly enjoyed her short-lived triumph. After the death of Charles in 1574, and the succession of Anjou under the name of Henry III., Catherine pursued her old policy of compromise and concessions; but as her influence is lost in that of her son, it is unnecessary to dwell upon it. She died on the 5th of January 1589, a short time before the assassination of Henry, and the consequent extinction of the House of Valois. In her taste for art and her love of magnificence and luxury, Catherine was a true Medici; her banquets at Fontainebleau in 1564 were famous for their sumptuousness. In architecture especially she was well versed, and Philibert de l’Orme relates that she discussed with him the plan and decoration of her palace of the Tuileries. Catherine’s policy provoked a crowd of pamphlets, the most celebrated being the Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et déportemens de la reine Catherine de Médicis, in which Henri Estienne undoubtedly collaborated.
See Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, edited by Hector de la Ferrière (Paris, 1880, seq.), in the Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France; A. von Reumont, Die Jugend Caterinas de’ Medici (1854; French translation by A. Baschet, 1866); H. Bouchot, Catherine de Médicis (Paris, 1899). For a more complete bibliography see Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France (vol. v., by H. Lemonnier, and vol. vi., by J.H. Mariéjol, 1904-1905). See also Miss E. Sichel’s books, Catherine de’ Medici and the French Reformation (1905), and The Later Years of Catherine de’ Medici (1908).
CATHERINE OF ARAGON (1485-1536), queen of Henry VIII. of England, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was born on the 15th or 16th of December 1485. She left Spain in 1501 to marry Arthur, prince of Wales, eldest son of King Henry VII., and landed at Plymouth on the 2nd of October. The wedding took place on the 14th of November in London, and soon afterwards Catherine accompanied her youthful husband to Wales, where, in his sixteenth year, the prince died on the 2nd of April 1502. On the 25th of June 1503, she was formally betrothed to the king’s second son, Henry, now prince of Wales, and a papal dispensation for the alliance was obtained. The marriage, however, did not take place during the lifetime of Henry VII. Ferdinand endeavoured to cheat the English king of the marriage portion agreed upon, and Henry made use of the presence of the unmarried princess in England to extort new conditions, and especially to secure the marriage of his daughter Mary to the archduke Charles, grandson of Ferdinand, and afterwards Charles V. Catherine was thus from the first the unhappy victim of state politics. Writing to Ferdinand on the 11th of March 1509, she describes the state of poverty to which she was reduced, and declares the king’s unkindness impossible to be borne any longer.[1] On the old king’s death, however, a brighter prospect opened, for Henry VIII. decided immediately on marrying her, the wedding taking place on the 11th of June and the coronation on the 24th. Catherine now enjoyed a few years of married happiness; Henry showed himself an affectionate husband, and the alliance with Ferdinand was maintained against France. She was not without some influence in state affairs. During Henry’s invasion of France in 1513 she was made regent; she showed great zeal and ardour in the preparations for the Scottish expedition, and was riding towards the north to put herself at the head of the troops when the victory of Flodden Field ended the campaign. The following year an affectionate meeting took place between the king and queen at Richmond on the return of the former. Ferdinand’s treachery, however, in making a treaty with France roused Henry’s wrath, and his angry reproaches fell upon his unfortunate wife; but she took occasion in 1520, during the visit of her nephew Charles V. to England, to urge the policy of gaining his alliance rather than that of France. Immediately on his departure, on the 31st of May 1520, she accompanied the king to France, on the celebrated visit to Francis I., called from its splendour the Field of the Cloth of Gold; but in 1522 war was declared against France and the emperor again welcomed to England. In 1521 she is represented by Shakespeare as pleading for the unfortunate duke of Buckingham.