The whims of monarchs have created more romances in the history of women than the fancy of the novelist has ever invented, and the story of Peter’s wife and successor is one of the most piquant of these real adventures. Although in the years of her prosperity she did not shrink from the mention of her humble origin, the details of her childhood were never confidently known and are a matter of endless speculation. It is generally believed that she was the daughter of a Livonian peasant, but she makes her first certain appearance as maid-of-all-work in the house of a poor German pastor. Profoundly ignorant, plain of feature, coarse in taste, this woman became in time the sole mistress of the Russian Empire.
At the beginning of the Swedish war, in 1702, General Sheremetieff and the Russian forces besieged Marienburg. The Swedish commander threatened to blow up the fort rather than surrender, and the inhabitants fled to the Russian lines. Amongst them, brandishing his credentials (his Bible), was the Lutheran pastor of the town, with his wife and children and maid. He was suffered to proceed to Russia, but the maid remained in the camp. She was then seventeen years old, a lusty and vigorous peasant-girl such as soldiers covet. The pastor had eked out his slender income by taking lodgers, and it may or may not be true that Catherine, or Martha, as she is believed to have been named at the time, was too intimate with them, and had been married by the pastor for the protection of her morals. She had no more morals than Peter. In the camp she now gained rapid promotion. At first she washed the shirts and shared the bed and board of a non-commissioned officer; then she had the favour of General Sheremetieff; then the florid taste of Menshikoff was attracted to her, and she was drafted to his household, and harem, at Moscow. There Peter saw and appropriated her.
There is, as I said, little reason to seek some secret of her success. She was of the robust sensual type that Peter preferred. But she must have been at once shrewd and amiable to have kept his affection as long as she did. His letters to her show, besides the link of common coarseness and frank sensuality, a good deal of affection on both sides. Peter took her to the cottage which he built on the banks of the Neva, where her second boy was born. It was a small two-roomed cottage, of rough-hewn trunks of trees, only about fifty feet in frontage and less in depth. In one of the plain rooms, the walls of which were covered with canvas, Peter planned and received visitors. In the other Catherine and he dined, with an occasional intimate friend, and slept. In 1708 he built a larger and rather finer cottage, more neatly furnished, but, as in earlier days, he preferred to let Menshikoff keep a palace in which, with all splendour of gold plate and powdered lackeys and an army of cooks, he could give his banquets. In the cottage with Catherine he ate his large coarse meals, drank his tea and gin and brandy, and smoked great quantities of tobacco. He carried about with him his wooden spoon and bone-handled knife and fork. Catherine darned his woollen socks and washed his shirts—fine clean linen was almost the one luxury he liked—and babies appeared with great regularity. Often when the tramp of his heavy boots told that he was in a mood of fury, when servants and friends fled, for he would hit out with fist or cane or even sword at such times, Catherine took his blood-congested head in her plump hands and ran her fingers through his thick hair; and he gradually sank to sleep on her breast.
She was good to him, he felt, and he must provide for her and the children. But he was now a great monarch, corresponding with all the courts of Europe and visiting many of them. The idea of marrying her must be given long consideration. There were Eudoxia’s sons, and there were Catherine’s sons. It was a puzzling business, and Peter did not attack a puzzling business when it could wait. In 1706 he seemed to make up his mind. He took the whole company of “the girls”—Catherine, and Anisia Tolstoi, and the two Menshikoffs and two Arsenieffs—to Kieff, summoned Menshikoff, and told him that he must marry Daria Arsenieff and become respectable. Menshikoff was not the man to be restricted by vows of marriage, and he obeyed. But Peter did not, as Catherine expected, follow his friend’s example. He was content to make a will in which he assigned her and her four children an imperial legacy of 1,500 dollars!
By 1711 he let it be understood that Catherine was his wife, and he publicly went through the form of marriage with her. Whether there was a valid marriage or no is not clear. Catherine is said to have been married at Marienburg, and Peter’s first marriage does not seem to have been annulled by the proper authorities. Russia and Europe would not inquire too closely. Catherine went with him everywhere, except to Paris, and shared his long rides on horseback and his rough camp-life. She never attempted to interfere in affairs of State; but she secretly made large sums of money by getting favours or pardon for offenders. She remained very friendly with Menshikoff, who taught her the security of foreign investments.
Peter discovered her trickery, and a cloud came over their relations, but the question of the succession worried him. The new complication was that he was intimate with the charming daughter of Prince Kantemir of Wallachia. The Prince had lost his little principality after Peter’s defeat on the Pruth, and had come to St. Petersburg to seek compensation. He knew the relation of the Tsar to his daughter Maria and expected him to divorce Catherine and wed her. It was a very anxious time for all. Alexis died, or was executed, in 1718; Catherine’s second son died in 1719; and in 1722 Maria Kantemir, who was then at Astrakhan, expected a child. To the relief of Catherine and her party, and the violent anger of Peter, Maria had a miscarriage and nearly died.
Catherine now got the title of Empress, and in 1724 she was crowned. Still Peter, although his health gave great concern, evaded the problem of the succession, but he allowed Catherine a superb coronation. When she showed him her magnificent robe, which cost 2,000 dollars, he impatiently pushed it aside, but he let her have a crown made which cost nearly a million dollars. And within little over six months she, by her reckless and ungrateful conduct, forfeited whatever right she may have had and barely escaped with her life.
We remember the giddy Anna Mons, Peter’s mistress for a time in the foreign settlement at Moscow. Anna’s brother William was one of Catherine’s chamberlains, and the whole court believed that they were intimate. At length a letter which is said to have proved it fell into Peter’s hands. He seems to have felt bitterly the ignominy of publicly discrowning his new Empress, and for a long time he did nothing, beyond torturing a witness or two to extract proof. They thought that he had decided to overlook it, and both Catherine and Mons were at supper with him one night in November. “What time is it?” he suddenly asked, and Catherine replied that it was nine. He grimly took her watch, put it on three hours, and said that, as it was midnight, everybody would go to bed. Mons was arrested and tortured, and, after a few days, beheaded on the ground of corrupt practices. His sister Matrena was knouted and sent to Siberia. Catherine’s personal fortune was taken out of her hands for administration, and officials were forbidden in future to take any orders from her.
The iron nerve of the woman in those awful days proves that, in spite of her origin and ways, she had a steady head and strong character. Peter took her for a drive, and passed so close to the scaffold that her dress almost brushed against the body of Mons. She did not flinch. He had the head put into a glass vessel of spirits of wine and placed in her room. She took no notice. When he angrily smashed a costly Venetian glass with his fist, saying that he would so treat her and her relatives, she scolded him for the waste. He still saw Maria Kantemir daily, and he now professed to make a discovery which doubled his fury. He had the Greek doctor who had attended Maria in 1722 “questioned,” and Catherine was accused of having procured the miscarriage.
What his precise reasons were for not prosecuting and disowning Catherine we do not know. Some think that he spared her out of affection: some that, as he still sought a French prince for his and her daughter, he shrank from the scandal. His mind was in a maudlin state. Decades of terrific work and constant debauch had brought their inevitable consequence, yet, with periods of enforced sobriety, he still maintained his wild ways. The year 1724 had been one of reckless orgies and much illness, and it was in 1725 that he caused the death of an aged noble by making him sit for hours, naked, on the frozen Neva because he would not join their licentious and childish revels. Peter was still the man who, in 1715, had dissected with his own hands the corpse of his aunt Apraxin to see if she was really a virgin.
In the first month of 1725 he had a superficial reconciliation with Catherine. A few weeks later, however, he caught a fatal chill, and he died within a fortnight. Russia did not mourn. His great and real services were such as only a later age could appreciate. His rugged, vicious, cruel personality was known to all, and the cost of his work had been heavy. One might say that there was in Peter the material of a great man, but the Romanoff dynasty never produced a great man. The material, in this one opportunity, was too deeply vitiated to develop. Peter was an incarnation of the national vices and—except indolence—the weaknesses he ought to have assailed.
The unsubstantiality of most of his work appears in the sequel. Before he was dead there began the traditional squabble for power, the familiar grouping and intriguing of parties. The great majority of the nobles and clergy were in favour of Peter, the young son of Alexis and Charlotte. Catherine was too closely identified with the dying Tsar and all his hated schemes and reforms. But a few great nobles like Prince Menshikoff and Count Tolstoi knew that their fortune was bound up with that of Catherine, and they set to work as soon as the Tsar’s illness proved fatal. The troops were discontented, their pay in arrears and their limbs weary from the heavy constructive work to which Peter had put them. Catherine was directed to appeal to them for support and promise ample pay. The higher clergy who held power under Peter’s new scheme of Church-government were equally interested in sustaining his work. The palace was full of whispers and secret movements.
The Council met while Peter lay dying, and the spokesmen of the majority confidently proposed his grandson for the throne. Tolstoi attacked them, and proposed Catherine; and after a long and furious debate Catherine was declared Autocrat of all the Russias. They found her weeping at Peter’s bedside, and there was a rush to take the oath. Moscow was mutinous for a time, but the army was won by generous treatment, and the country followed. The guards were provided with new uniforms and pay, and it was decreed that in future soldiers must not be employed upon such work as the making of canals. For the mass of the people, too, a great relief was afforded by the reduction, by one third, of the crushing poll-tax which Peter had imposed; and a political amnesty brought back thousands to their homes from the squalid jails or the frozen wastes of the north an............