The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

Catherine is said to have doubled the resources and revenues of her empire. Undoubtedly she increased the resources by the extension of her commerce; and by her conquests over the Turks, which threw open the trade and navigation of the Mediterranean, she added greatly to the power of Russia; but she exhausted her resources much faster than she could create them, and she wasted her revenues more quickly than she could replenish them. She doubled and trebled the taxes of her oppressed people, and the legal pillage of her tyrannical officers drove whole provinces to desperation.

“Kings and queens,” she wrote in her letter to Queen Marie Antoinette, “ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of the dogs.” A fine sentiment truly, and one which she took good care should not grow dull for want of use during her lifetime.

To find some parallel for the criminal profusion of Catherine, a profusion which exceeds all calculation, we must go back to the days of Caligula and Heliogabalus.

Her favorites were countless: her lavishness towards them almost incredible. Upon them she squandered a sum equal to $100,000,000.

She bestowed estates equal in extent to provinces; and by a word, by a stroke of her pen, she, who called her people her children, and, by her royal clemency, had substituted the word subject for slave, gave away thousands, tens of thousands, of serfs, poor wretches transferred like cattle from one proprietor to another. “She gave diamonds by handfuls, and made gold and silver as common as pebbles. Yet when we read over the names and qualifications of those who were her confidants and ministers, or of those who were particularly distinguished by her munificence, it is like looking over the peerage of Pandemonium”; for where but in the court of Russia, with a female Louis XV. in the person of Catherine II. upon the imperial throne, could such an assemblage of fiends and savages, ruffians and reptiles, demons and cormorants, have been congregated together to fatten on the blood and tears of an oppressed people?

In pursuance of the mighty plans which she had formed, Catherine kept two objects steadily in view: first, to extend her dominions on the west by seizing Poland; and secondly, to drive the Turks from Constantinople.

She began with Poland, marched an army into that country, forced upon the Poles a king of her own choice, dictated laws at the point of the bayonet, intimidated the weak by threats, and massacred and exiled all who resisted.

The Poles could not endure this usurpation of their country. They rose against the Russians, and from 1765, when Catherine first invaded the country, till its final seizure in 1795, Poland presented a scene of horror, calamity, and crime.

The Poles besought the aid of the Turks, and thus began the first Turkish war declared in 1768. Fierce and bloody was this war, and in 1774 the Turks were compelled to sue for peace, acceding to the humiliating conditions which Catherine haughtily demanded, that the Ottoman Porte should recognize the independence of the Crimea, and yield to Russia the free navigation of the Black Sea and the Archipelago.

In 1774 also, the empress-queen disgraced Gregory Orloff and raised to the post of favorite and chief minister, Potemkin, afterward Prince Potemkin, of infamous renown, who for more than twenty years held the highest honors of the empire. He was neither a great statesman nor a great general, but he was certainly an extraordinary man. He had all the petulance, audacity, and wilfulness of a spoiled boy, yet he possessed a genius fit to conceive and execute great designs. “His character displayed a singular union of barbarism and grandeur, and of the most inconsistent and apparently incompatible qualities. He was at once the most indolent and the most active man in the world; the most luxurious, and the most indefatigable; no dangers appalled and no difficulties repulsed him; yet the slightest caprice, a mere fit of temper, would cause him to abandon projects of vital importance. At one time he talked of making himself king of Poland; at another of turning monk or bishop. He began everything, completed nothing, disordered the finances, disorganized the army, depopulated the country. He lived with the magnificence of a sovereign prince. At one moment he would make an aide-de-camp ride two or three hundred miles to bring him a melon or a pineapple; at another he would be found devouring a raw carrot or cucumber in his own antechamber.

“He scarcely ever opened a book, yet he learned everything, and forgot nothing; his wonderful quickness in appropriating the knowledge of others served him instead of study. Altogether his great qualities and his defects precisely fitted him to obtain the ascendency over such a mind as that of Catherine; she grew tired of others, but his caprices, his magnificence, and his gigantic plans, continually interested and occupied her.” Under his administration all things did not go on well, we may be sure but all went on, and the empress was content.

The second Turkish war having ended in 1783 with the annexation of the Crimea and Kuban, under the classic names of Taurida and the Caucasus, Potemkin persuaded Catherine to go and admire herself in her new dominions, a thing which she was only too ready to do.

So on the 18th of January, 1787, the imperial cortège set out from St. Petersburg. There were fourteen carriages upon sledges for the empress and her court, and one hundred and sixty for the attendants and baggage. Five hundred and sixty relays of horses waited them at every post, and the luxurious carriages flew over the frozen plains at the rate of a hundred miles a day. Wherever they stopped, a temporary palace was erected for the empress, fitted with every luxury, and arranged, as much as possible, like her palace at St. Petersburg. When they arrived at Khief, the empress embarked on the Dnieper, and with a fleet of fifty galleys sailed down the river to Cherson.

Here money, provisions, and troops had been conveyed from every part of the empire. The Borysthenes was covered with magnificent galleys; a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were newly equipped; deserts were peopled for the occasion, and palaces reared for the empress queen in the midst of trackless wilds.

The king of Poland came to do her homage, and the Emperor Joseph was content to mingle among the herd of her courtiers and swell the splendor of her state.

Catherine herself scattered diamonds and honors with her usual liberality. “In her travelling-carriage she had a large, green sack, full of gold coins, and her courtiers were kept busy throwing handfuls out of the window to the people, who lay grovelling on the earth as her carriage passed by.”

After six months spent in this sort of travelling, the empress returned to St. Petersburg.

As a refuge from the cares of state, Louis XIV. had built his Trianon, and Frederick the Great his Sans-Souci, and Catherine II., oppressed like them, reared the splendid palace of the Hermitage, within whose portals she laid aside the imperial diadem of all the Russias, and became a patron of literature and the fine arts.

Beneath a great portal, supported by colossal granite giants, is the entrance to this Hermitage, over whose steps have often passed those discarded favorites of the empress-queen, smothering under forced smiles and honeyed words their inward rage and indignation; for when Catherine wearied of her favorites she sent them an order to travel.

“I am tired of him,” she would say; “his ignorance makes me blush. He can speak nothing but Russian. He must travel in France and England to learn other languages.” The courtier who received this intelligence was not long in preparing his travelling-carriage.

At the Hermitage, Catherine surrounded herself with men of letters. Here were Lomonozof, the poet; Sumorokof, the dramatic author; Kheraskof, the writer of tragedies; Sherebetoff, the historian; and Pallas, the naturalist.

She especially affected the friendship of French writers. She entertained Diderot with royal magnificence, and purchased his library; she gave the education of her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, to the care of the republican Laharpe; and she kept up a constant correspondence with Voltaire. Catherine, herself, had no real love for the arts; but she patronized them all as subservient to her glory and her power.

“Thus she not only had no taste for music, but she was destitute of ear to distinguish one tune from another, as she often frankly acknowledged; but nothing less would serve her than an Italian corps d’opera attached to her domestic establishment. She had no taste for painting, yet she purchased at a high price some beautiful collections, and in the gallery of her palace of the Hermitage hung some magnificent specimens of the Italian and Flemish schools, purchased in France and Italy.”

Fifteen miles from the capital of Russia is the beautiful palace of Czars-Koe-Selo, the Versailles of St. Petersburg. Catherine II. was very fond of this place, and spent enormous sums on its embellishment. Originally every ornament and statue upon the façade of the palace, which is no less than twelve hundred feet in length, was heavily plated with gold. After a few years the gilding wore off, and the contractors engaged to repair it offered the empress nearly half a million of dollars for the fragments which remained. But the extravagant Catherine answered them scornfully: —

“I am not in the habit, gentlemen,” she said, “of selling my old clothes.”

The main avenue leading to this palace of Czars-Koe-Selo is ornamented with several Chinese statues. One morning as the empress was taking her usual promenade along the avenue, she thought she detected a faint smile upon the face of one of the heathen images. She observed it more closely. Surely it was no fancy! the eyes returned her gaze, and that, too, with an expression remarkably human.

Catherine II. was not a woman to be afraid of anything. Accordingly, she walked straight towards the statue, determined to solve the mystery. She was startled for a moment, however, when all the figures leaped from their pedestals, and, hats in hand, begged her to pardon the little surprise with which they tried to enliven her morning walk; for her favorite Potemkin and three other courtiers had, in jest, exactly copied the dress and attitude of the Chinese figures.

When Prince Bismarck was Prussian ambassador at the court of Alexander II., he was one day standing with the Czar at a window of the Peterhof Palace, when he observed a sentinel in the centre of the lawn with apparently nothing whatever to guard. Out of curiosity he inquired of the Czar why the man was stationed there. Alexander turned to an aide-de-camp.

“Count – ,” said he, “why is that soldier stationed there?”

“I do not know, your Imperial Majesty.”

The Czar frowned. “Send me the officer in command,” he said.

The officer appeared. “Prince – why is a sentinel stationed on that lawn?”

“I do not know, your Majesty.”

“Not know?” cried the Czar in surprise; “request then the general commanding the troops at Peterhof to present himself immediately.”

The general appeared. “General,” said the Czar, “why is that soldier stationed in yonder isolated place?”

“I beg leave to inform your Majesty that it is in accordance with an ancient custom,” replied the general evasively.

“What was the origin of the custom?” inquired Bismarck.

“I – I do not at present recollect,” stammered the officer.

“Investigate, and report the result,” said Alexander.

So the investigation began, and after three days and nights of incessant labor, it was ascertained that some eighty years before, Catherine II., looking out one spring morning from the windows of this palace of Peterhof, observed in the centre of this lawn, the first May-flower of the season, lifting its delicate head above the lately frozen soil.

She ordered a soldier to stand there to prevent its being plucked. The order was inscribed upon the books; and thus for eighty years, in summer and in winter, in sunshine and in storm, a sentinel had stood upon that spot, no one apparently, until the time of Bismarck, caring to question the reason of his so doing! Such was, and is, the absolutism of the government of the Czars!

Catherine had long resolved that one of her granddaughters should be queen of Sweden.

Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, was already affianced to a princess of Mecklenburg; but with Catherine to will was to do, so she contrived to have this marriage broken off, and brought the young king to St. Petersburg, where she thought her own consummate address and the charms of the intended bride would accomplish the rest.

For once, however, Catherine, the crafty, deceived herself.

Proposals of marriage were speedily made, the treaty drawn up, the day of betrothment fixed, and a splendid fête prepared.

The appointed time arrived. The empress, surrounded by her court, sat in the audience chamber of the Winter Palace.

Alexandrina, adorned in bridal pomp, stood at the side of her imperial grandmother; all was in readiness, but the royal bridegroom came not. They waited – there was a depressing silence – the bride turned pale, the empress turned red, the courtiers looked at one another ominously.

A very different scene, however, was being enacted in the apartments of the king of Sweden.

The Chancellor Markoff had brought the articles of marriage to him for his signature. As a mere matter of form, he read them over rapidly; but the young king, who listened, became aware that certain articles were inserted which had not been previously agreed upon.

It was a law of Sweden that the queen of the country must profess the faith of the nation, and exchange the Greek for the Lutheran church; but the haughty and imperious Catherine had decided that her imperial granddaughter should be made an exception to this law, and had introduced into the marriage treaty a clause to that effect.

The king refused to sign the contract.

The chancellor was thunderstruck. A mere boy to resist the will of the empress; it was preposterous!

He flattered, he entreated, he implored; but all in vain.

Gustavus was immovable; and enraged at the attempt to deceive him, he flung the papers away.

“No,” he cried furiously, “I will not have it! I will not sign!” and he shut himself up in his own apartment.

Here was an unexpected contretemps. Who would dare to relate this pleasing news to the empress-queen, surrounded by her expectant court?

For some time no one could be prevailed upon to do it, but finally her favorite, Zuboff, approached Catherine and whispered to her. The blood rushed to her face and, attempting to rise, she staggered. But she controlled herself with a mighty effort, and dismissing her court under the pretence that the king of Sweden was suddenly indisposed, retired to her cabinet.

The poor Princess Alexandrina was conducted to her apartment, where she fainted away. In her tender heart, a sad and crushing sorrow mingled with mortification and wounded pride; but Catherine the imperial, Catherine the imperious, – what were her sensations?

“Braved on her throne, insulted in her court, overreached in her policy, she could only sustain herself by the hope of vengeance. Pride and state etiquette forbade any expression of temper, but the effect on her frame was perhaps more than fatal. The king of Sweden took his departure a few days afterward, and Catherine, who from that instant meditated his destruction, was preparing all the resources of her great empire for war, – war on every side, – when the death stroke came, and she fell, like a sorceress, suffocated among her own poisons.”

Upon the 9th of November, 1796, she was found by her attendants stretched upon the floor of her apartment, struck by apoplexy. All attempts to reanimate her were in vain; and on the following day, without having had one moment granted her to think, to prepare, or to repent, this terrible and depraved old woman was hurried out of the world, with all her sins upon her head.

Such was the end of her whom the Prince de Ligne had pompously styled “Catherine la Grande.”

Though her political crimes and private sins were such as to consign her to universal execration, she seems to have possessed all the graces of an accomplished Frenchwoman.

In her personal deportment, and in the circle of her court, she was kind, easy, and good-humored. Her serenity of temper and composure of manner were remarkable; and the contrast between the simplicity of her deportment in private and the grandeur of her situation rendered her exceedingly fascinating.

She possessed so many accomplishments, was so elegant and dignified, and performed with such majesty and decorum all the external functions of royalty, that none approached her without respect and admiration; but her selfishness and her depravity spoiled all, and made her what we have seen her.

Among all the famous queens of history, there is not one, save Catherine de’ Medici, whose career is so utterly devoid of noble acts, so entirely dictated by “selfishness, lust, and sordid greed,” as that of Catherine II., removed by the grace of God on the 10th of November, 1796, from being longer empress of all the Russias, and from the world which she had done so much to pollute.