The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Read Online Free PDF Page B

important as Elizabeth’s health worsened and a succession struggle loomed . 20 Thus in 1756, in a letter to her mentor, Hanbury-Williams, Catherine planned ahead. “After being informed of her death and making sure that there is no mistake, I will go straight to my son’s room.” 21 Her son and timely information through her allies were crucial to her political and even physical survival. The Empress countered Catherine’s intrigues by isolating her—from her son, friendly courtiers, and bad news about Elizabeth’s health—to make her less of a threat. As the memoirs make clear, the Empress also carefully kept Catherine on a limited budget of 30,000 rubles per year and watched what Catherine spent. However, Catherine ran up a debt of six hundred thousand rubles by 1762, money she used to buy the loyalty of courtiers and of her husband, as well as dresses. 22 After another miscarriage, she had two more children, a daughter, Anna Petrovna (1757–59), by a future King of Poland, Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1732–98), and by Count Grigory Orlov, a son, Count Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, born on April 11, 1762 (d. 1813), without any of the usual fanfare. On June 28, Catherine seized power, aided by forty supporters, including Orlov and his four brothers, and became Catherine II, Empress of Russia. This pragmatic mixture of love and politics affected her relations with her son, Paul, and with Orlov, and would reach its apogee with Prince Potemkin. Catherine’s personal relations had serious political consequences for her and others due to the concentration of power in individuals and the intimate, familial nature of rule in Russia at this time. 23
    In all her memoirs Catherine balances her relationships with her husband and with Elizabeth, for although her ultimate future depends on Peter, her immediate future is in Elizabeth’s hands. This central double thread in the memoirs reflects a system of inheritance in which Elizabeth could choose and, equally important, dismiss her chosen successor. Having disinherited his eldest son, Alexei, on February 3, 1718, in a manifesto, on February 5, 1722, Peter the Great issued the Law of Succession to the Throne, in which he concluded: “We deem it good to issue this edict in order that it will always be subject to the will of the ruling monarch to appoint whom he wishes to the succession or to remove the one he has appointed in the case of unseemly behavior.” 24 He nevertheless died in 1725 without naming a successor, and his second wife, born Martha Skavronska, a Livonian peasant, became Catherine I (1684– 1727). Surely it was no more fantastic for a well-connected German Princess, not only married to Emperor Peter III but also related to him and Empress Elizabeth, to become Empress.
    Much has been made of Catherine’s ominous desire for the throne, which she does not hide in the memoirs. For example, on the eve of her wedding, filled with foreboding, Catherine consoles herself: “My heart did not foresee great happiness; ambition alone sustained me. At the bottom of my soul I had something, I know not what, that never for a single moment let me doubt that sooner or later I would succeed in becoming the sovereign Empress of Russia in my own right.” Catherine’s correspondence with Hanbury-Williams gives some idea of her machinations to promote her husband, her son, and by extension herself during an uncertain succession. This all seems quite damning evidence of excessive ambition, except that it was in fact possible, though unlikely, for Catherine to rule legitimately—if Elizabeth named her as heir. According to the early and middle memoirs, Catherine’s mother urged Procurator General Prince Trubetskoi to ask the Empress whether her title should include Heiress to the Throne, and Elizabeth declined (50, 453). Yet the final memoir ends with a very important conversation between Catherine and Elizabeth that hints at the possibility that Elizabeth might