August 9, 2010 • 21 mins
Catherine the Great remains one of the most influential female figures in European history, but how did she get her start? In the first segment of this two-part series, Sarah and Katie explore Catherine the Great's rise to power.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we
were talking about our favorite royal monikers and also our
(00:21):
least favorite royal monikers. Mine is Henry the Impotent Sarah,
which Letty Mary is pretty bad. Louis the Indolent also bad,
but at least Letty Mary has a drink named after her,
and you cannot say that about Henry the Impotent. That's
a good point, Katie. But there is a name that
everyone knows, and that is Catherine the Great, and like Elizabeth,
(00:42):
the first subject of many of our past episodes, she
is a strong woman who ruled an empire and made
it greater. She's known not only for her political acumen,
which really kept her in the public imagination, but also
for her many love affairs, which we'll get into that
a little bit later, actually a little bit on this podcast.
(01:04):
And of course that long standing rumor that she met
her death copulating with a horse. That's that's quite the
resume we have, I think. So this is part one
of the life of Catherine the Great. We will have
a follow up episode, because you know, we love a series.
So no one is born the great obviously, maybe the cute,
(01:25):
or the fat or the crying, but not the great.
And this baby was born Sophia Auguste Frederica, a German
princess before there was really a Germany, on May second,
seventeen twenty nine. Her father, Christian August is referred to
as an obscure princeling in more than one source, which
made me WinCE for him just a little bit. He's
(01:46):
always referred to as minor, and he's very much love
by his daughter. But her mother, on the other hand,
was a bit of a handful, and she was Princess
Joanna Elizabeth of Holstein Gottorp and her brother had been
engage to Elizabeth the First of Russia for a time,
and when he died, Elizabeth kept a soft spot for
(02:07):
his family. So when the Empress Elizabeth needs a wife
for her nephew, Peter the Third, she thinks about this
family that she's always held so fondly, and she thinks
that young Sophia might be a good bride. So Sophia
and her mother travel to Russia to curry the Empress's
favor they're really successful at it. Uh. Elizabeth likes Sophia
(02:28):
a lot, even though court life proves to be rather difficult.
It's very expensive to keep up appearances in court, and
this isn't something that Sophia and her family can do.
It's very strict, especially the rules of etiquette. And because
she's under everyone's eye as this possible marriage material exactly,
and people are always watching her, but she's watching them too,
(02:50):
and she's learning how to play political game, which is
something that Peter never learns to do. And although she
likes him at first, the more she gets to know him,
she realizes that he's going to be a hindrance and
not a boon to her successful future at court. He's
referred to and all the things we were reading as well,
often as a buffoon. Very often, he's generally considered inapt,
(03:15):
he's considered not well mannered, not cultured, lazy, and possibly
an alcoholic. So great personal z exactly. And here's Sophia
basically bound to to marry this guy. And she's understandably
a little bit lonely, so she does a lot of reading.
She becomes acquainted with the ideals of the Enlightenment, and
(03:37):
she also starts studying Russian, and she studies Russian until
she's fluent, which is something that definitely impresses her future subjects.
She's immersing herself in Russian culture, not being this foreign, distant,
isolated ruler. She's she's going to be involved if she's
going to play this game. And the same goes for
studying the Orthodox Church and eventually even leaving her religion
(04:00):
of Lutheranism and committing to Orthodoxy pretty wholeheartedly, which is
where we get her name. Katherine changed when she converted,
and she had to in order to move to the
next stage of her life marriage with Peter. So, in
addition to all those stellar qualities that we just mentioned,
the alcoholism, the poor manners, Peter is also just a
(04:23):
really really weird guy. He's obsessed with soldiers and military stuff,
but not in a good sort of air to the
throne way, more like a little boy, yes, overgrown little
boy way. He plays poppets in bed and makes her
play them as well. By the way, like a lot
of these details I got from Virginia Rounding's biography of
(04:44):
Katherine the Great, which is pretty great. Puppets in bed
definitely a good detail to know about someone. He drinks
a lot, as we mentioned, and it's not just sullen drinking,
it's carousing until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes
forcing kath Her to come along with them. And they
have nothing in common. She's smart, she's charming, she's intellectually curious.
(05:08):
He's none of those things, and the divide just grows
the longer that they're together. In her memoirs, she describes
herself as a miserable creature during this time in her life,
and she is of course being pressured or even bullied
by Elizabeth to have a son. They need an air,
and the court treats her as what she is, just,
(05:29):
you know, a baby making machine, a vessel for this air,
and so she's kept fairly isolated. Elizabeth puts spies in
as her ladies, and she's not really allowed to have friends.
She's supposed to be concentrating on one thing, and one
thing only. As soon as she develops the friendship, even
the lady is sent away and she's supposed to get
(05:49):
back to the task at hand. The only problem is
they don't really know how to have sex, and it's
possible that Peter had impotence problems but he may just
have not known what he was doing at all. Just
so Marie Antoinette and her husband, That's all I could
think of exactly. So their marriage isn't consummated for a
long time, and only then it's because it was arranged
(06:11):
for Peter to learn the ropes from this young widow,
which I can't understand how they drafted someone for that
job now that he's able to perform. Peter and Catherine
do engage in conjugal activities, but they hate each other,
so it must have been really awkward, not to mention,
not very fun, so they don't do it very often,
(06:35):
and in the eyes of those watching her so carefully,
it's not often enough that she'll produce this air. So
again an arrangement is made, but this time for Katherine.
She had grown rather close to a man at court,
Sergei Saltikov, and this relationship is now permitted or even encouraged. So, surprise, surprise,
(06:56):
Catherine gives birth to this much desired son, named him Paul.
There's a question was it Peter's child, Was it Sarage's bess?
Are actually that it was Peter's child. He apparently was
a lot like his father when he had some of
his some of his similar interests. He like Prussia a lot,
not that that would necessarily be inherited, but interests in
(07:18):
the Russia. So immediately after Paul's birth, Elizabeth whisks him
away and she's the one who raises this spoiled, sickly
air whatever Catherine may have wanted from him. And she
had another child, a daughter named Anna Petrovna, not to
be confused with other Anna Petrovna, as we may have
talked about in seventeen fifty seven. She probably was not
(07:41):
Peter's kid um, but handsome Stanislav Poniatowski's another lover, and
he will come into play in our next podcast. That
Anna died before she reached her second birthday, and she's
never spoken of again, which is strange. But speaking of
more illnesses, a Liz of that the Empress had been
ill for quite some time. It's possible she had epilepsy.
(08:05):
She definitely had some form of a dima, and she
knew she was dying. She died on December seventeen sixty
one after a nosebleed. She may have hemorrhaged to death,
and Catherine acted respectfully after the Empress's death, she wears mourning.
She praised publicly for her and this is a smart
move people. You know, people like that sort of thing.
(08:27):
Remember how angry people were when Elizabeth the Second of
England apparently didn't show enough grief after Princess Diana died. Peter,
on the other hand, thought it was a good idea
to play a game behind the hearse that involved a
lot of running and watching his cape swish about, and
then he would hang back for a little bit so
he could run some more, and once he caught up,
(08:48):
he would do the same thing over and over again.
So picture this. There's his aunt's coffin, people in mourning
for their most pious autocrat, and then their new ruler
who's gleefully playing childish games in a funeral procession. It
was horrifying, and it was a very good example of
the kind of man that Peter was. So people are
(09:09):
immediately thinking, how can we get rid of this guy?
Who can we replace him with? He obviously has problems,
and so some think it's time to bring back Ivan
the sixth, who is that sad little baby growing up
in the prison that we mentioned in an earlier Actually,
we did a whole podcast on him earlier, and some
people think that, no, forget, forget this strange boy who
(09:32):
has grown up in prison. Let's enthrone Catherine because she's
actually very impressive. And she resists though, and that's because
she has a little secret. She is pregnant again and
it is not Peter's. It was her lover, Gregory or
Loss will talk about him in our second episode and
a little bit more. The key here is that everybody
(09:53):
would know it was not Peter's baby either, so she'd
be put on the national stage, so to say, and
be revealed as pregnant. It would be devastating for her hopes. Yeah,
the sex ceased as far as Peter the Third goes.
She manages to hide her pregnancy the entire time. No
one figures it out. And when Alexei was born in April,
(10:15):
she hands him over to one of her servants so
he's out of the way. Maybe we're clearing a path
to the throne. So Catherine's not going to stage a
coup quite yet at least, and so we get to
experience a little bit of Peter the Third on the throne.
In February seventeen sixty two, there's a bit of a
class shake up when Peter declares that there will be
(10:37):
no more compulsory service for nobles during peace time, and
nobody knows what to think of this. The nobles are wondering,
is this good for us? Well, yeah, we don't have
to have service. But on the other hand, this is
how we would rise in the ranks. The surfs are
not quite sure how it affects them. It's a decision
that was made without any thought, which describes a lot
(11:01):
of things that Peter does. Actually, his first possible mistake
wasn't angering the church by secularizing monastic property, but his
biggest one dealt with the Seven Years War. Russia had
almost beaten Frederick of Prussia after years of fighting and
so many Russian soldiers dying. Peter stops the war, makes
(11:22):
peace with Prussia, and they offer him land and he
won't even take it. You know, no, no, you keep
it Prussia. So all those soldiers died for nothing, and
it became clear that Peter cared much more for Prussia
than he did for Russia, especially when he ignores the
things that are important to them, like, you know, learning
their language, and he skips the coronation ceremony, which was
(11:45):
a huge deal, you know, people want to celebrate when
there's a new person, and it also had some religious
overtones that that needed to be there for the Russian
people to be behind him. So ultimately, even Peter's good
deeds as emperor, like he does get of the secret police,
for example, people don't pay any heed to that. It's
completely ignored because here's this guy making disastrous decisions for
(12:09):
the country and not even seeming to care. And there
are more warning signs he won't share his power at
all with Catherine, and people are beginning to worry that
he might get rid of her in favor of his mistress.
And remember, people really do like her. She's devout, she
clearly loves her country, and the general sentiment is that
they would be better off with her at the Helm
(12:31):
than this guy who's now dressing his military in Prussian uniforms.
Plus he's drinking more than ever, and he doesn't know
anything about business. He's keeping bad company, he's getting bad advice.
He's just in this terrible downward spiral. And the last
straw is a a very fancy dinner with a lot
of impressive people, at which Peter calls Catherine a fool
(12:54):
in front of all of them, and then repeats it
in case everyone hadn't heard, humiliating her in this brutal way,
she's in tears. Someone else has to distract everyone from
what's going on. But Peter is the fool and he
is not cut out for the job of ruling all
the Rushes. So with everybody hating Peter the third, it's
(13:15):
time for some action, and there's a conspiracy afoot to
crown Catherine now that that baby's out of the way,
and she's the one heading up the conspiracy. Surprise, surprise,
she has thirty officers ten thousands of alterns according to
Virginia Roundings book, and she has financial support from not
only Russia but Denmark, and a very detailed plan about
(13:38):
how this is going to go down. Unless you feel
bad for Peter, he's been told about the coup, he
just misses it, not having much respect for the formidable
ambitions and talents of his neglected wife, and in true
Peter style, he stays up partying until four am, completely
unconcerned and just a note on Catherine, she will never
(14:00):
ever ignore rumors about conspiracies or coup. She knows better,
and so Peter is not in St. Petersburg when the
coup takes place, and it doesn't go quite according to Plant.
Catherine has this great rundown for how everything is supposed
to go, but things don't fall into place. One conspirator
is arrested and the others have to hurry away before
(14:23):
he reveals what they're about to do. Catherine herself leaves
her apartment so fast that she's still wearing her nightcap.
She changes out of that nightcap and gets all fancy
and goes to regiments she already knew supported her, and
they swear allegiance to her. And it's a bit of
a domino effect. When she've got the first one, you
just move on to the second. And at the Church
(14:44):
of Our Lady of Kazan, site of her wedding, she
is proclaimed Empress of all the Russias and names her
son Paul as her successor. More people swear their allegiance
at the Winter Palace. So Peter's people tell him about
the coup, but he doesn't even believe it, So he's
a real an example of a dim historical figure. He
even looks for Catherine at their house at Montlosier, Well, Russia.
(15:08):
Is busy trying to crown her. I mean, he's looking
around for her like a check hivancy, and she is
long gone, Peter, She's never coming back. She proclaims that
Peter the Third endangered Orthodoxy, Sully's, Russia's military glory, and
undermined the Empire's institutions. I think that last one is debatable,
(15:29):
but I will give her the first two, even if
she goes on herself to endanger the Orthodox Church, as
we'll see in our next episode. But when she parades
in front of the people, it's in a tricorn hat
and a guards uniform, carrying a saber. This is a
woman who understands the importance of signifiers and of ceremony,
unlike Peter. No silly Kate games for her. So you
(15:52):
might wonder how is Peter dealing with this now that
he finally has accepted that it might be for real.
He's not dealing with He's just drinking. He's thinking up
more out their ideas. And then he finally realizes, yes,
she really has gotten him, and he starts sending letters
asking for forgiveness, promising that he'll change, and then simply asking, well,
(16:16):
can I at least get a Holstein with my mistress
and back out of the whole thing. She doesn't reply
to the first few, and to the last she simply
sends him an abdication letter to sign. It's pretty cold, Katherine.
He's stripped of his uniform and sent away to an
estate later to be transported to Schlusselburgh, which is where
(16:36):
they kept Ivan. Sixth. She does send him his pug
for company, which made Candice very happy, but she denies
his request for his mistress. You only get so much Peter,
and Catherine deposed him on June sixty two. She's crowned
September seventeen sixty two, and just a little note on
(16:56):
Catherine's crown, it has more than four thousand diamonds and
some giant ruby as well. Nice. So the people and
the soldiers get very very drunk though after the coronation,
and they almost riot, so sort of an inauspicious start.
I would say celebration plus vodka sounds very auspicious to me.
But as far as Peter being imprisoned, he's still drinking
(17:20):
with his guards, and he's miserable over his reduced circumstances.
He's getting very very sick, very often with some digestive ailments,
and he doesn't want to use the bathroom in front
of his guards, which is understandable. So one of the
brothers of Catherine's lover or Love writes in a letter
to her this very cryptic comment, I fear that he
(17:44):
might die tonight, but even more I fear that he
might live. And that's supposed. We get another letter from
the Orlovs that's very vague and almost incoherent, the bottom
line being there was an argument Peter was killed. They
don't remember what happened. Sounds like a bad story that
(18:07):
Catherine doesn't announce Peter's death until the next day and
gets natural causes colic, inflammation of the bowels, and apoplexy.
But when his body is displayed, it's obvious that something
very very bad happened to it. He has a black
face and you can see the blood through the skin,
which seems a little like he was poisoned. That would
(18:28):
explain some of those ailments exactly. And they're also strangulation
marks on his neck, so clearly not just not so
natural a case of colic. And she didn't go to
the burial, and he wasn't allowed to be buried in
the illustrious burial place of his forebears. Either people think
that she killed him and their son would grow up
(18:51):
thinking that she killed him. But did she The consensus
seems to be that she definitely knew about it, and
she never said it explicit, please go murder my husband,
but she okayed it and her wishes were clear, and
she would protect the men who committed the crime and
reward them for it. And Catherine believed that it was
(19:12):
her destiny to rule, that it was God's hand guiding
her life to that purpose. But I think she did
her best to help it along. So that brings us
to our next topic, which is going to be Catherine
in power will get to discuss all those interesting things
that happen when she's finally empress in her own right,
(19:32):
and that brings us to listener mail. Our first letter
is a correction from Laura and our Oscar Wild podcast.
We said the Oxford College of Magdalen like Mary Magdalen,
it should be pronounced Maudlin, and she says it's another
little Oxford oddity. Not sure if it's done just to
(19:54):
torture those tourists who don't know and ask after the
college only to receive the confusing answer there, so Magdalen Bridge,
but no college. Very weird and very Oxford. So thank
you Laura, and thank you England. So we've also got
a lot of really nice Hawaiian postcards since our episode
on Hawaii, including three so beautiful postcards. I think just
(20:18):
look at them all day from Vicky from Hawaii, and
I think it just sort of made us want to
take a nice island vacation, right I was staring wistfully
at them for a few minutes at my desk before
I brought them over to Sarah's. Yes, if you have
mail you'd like to send us, we have a tricky
way of making you find our address on the house
Stuff Works homepage if you'd like to send us email
(20:40):
with history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're
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(21:00):
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the stuff you missed in history class flogged on the
How Stuff Works dot com plume page bo
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we
were talking about our favorite royal monikers and also our
(00:21):
least favorite royal monikers. Mine is Henry the Impotent Sarah,
which Letty Mary is pretty bad. Louis the Indolent also bad,
but at least Letty Mary has a drink named after her,
and you cannot say that about Henry the Impotent. That's
a good point, Katie. But there is a name that
everyone knows, and that is Catherine the Great, and like Elizabeth,
(00:42):
the first subject of many of our past episodes, she
is a strong woman who ruled an empire and made
it greater. She's known not only for her political acumen,
which really kept her in the public imagination, but also
for her many love affairs, which we'll get into that
a little bit later, actually a little bit on this podcast.
(01:04):
And of course that long standing rumor that she met
her death copulating with a horse. That's that's quite the
resume we have, I think. So this is part one
of the life of Catherine the Great. We will have
a follow up episode, because you know, we love a series.
So no one is born the great obviously, maybe the cute,
(01:25):
or the fat or the crying, but not the great.
And this baby was born Sophia Auguste Frederica, a German
princess before there was really a Germany, on May second,
seventeen twenty nine. Her father, Christian August is referred to
as an obscure princeling in more than one source, which
made me WinCE for him just a little bit. He's
(01:46):
always referred to as minor, and he's very much love
by his daughter. But her mother, on the other hand,
was a bit of a handful, and she was Princess
Joanna Elizabeth of Holstein Gottorp and her brother had been
engage to Elizabeth the First of Russia for a time,
and when he died, Elizabeth kept a soft spot for
(02:07):
his family. So when the Empress Elizabeth needs a wife
for her nephew, Peter the Third, she thinks about this
family that she's always held so fondly, and she thinks
that young Sophia might be a good bride. So Sophia
and her mother travel to Russia to curry the Empress's
favor they're really successful at it. Uh. Elizabeth likes Sophia
(02:28):
a lot, even though court life proves to be rather difficult.
It's very expensive to keep up appearances in court, and
this isn't something that Sophia and her family can do.
It's very strict, especially the rules of etiquette. And because
she's under everyone's eye as this possible marriage material exactly,
and people are always watching her, but she's watching them too,
(02:50):
and she's learning how to play political game, which is
something that Peter never learns to do. And although she
likes him at first, the more she gets to know him,
she realizes that he's going to be a hindrance and
not a boon to her successful future at court. He's
referred to and all the things we were reading as well,
often as a buffoon. Very often, he's generally considered inapt,
(03:15):
he's considered not well mannered, not cultured, lazy, and possibly
an alcoholic. So great personal z exactly. And here's Sophia
basically bound to to marry this guy. And she's understandably
a little bit lonely, so she does a lot of reading.
She becomes acquainted with the ideals of the Enlightenment, and
(03:37):
she also starts studying Russian, and she studies Russian until
she's fluent, which is something that definitely impresses her future subjects.
She's immersing herself in Russian culture, not being this foreign, distant,
isolated ruler. She's she's going to be involved if she's
going to play this game. And the same goes for
studying the Orthodox Church and eventually even leaving her religion
(04:00):
of Lutheranism and committing to Orthodoxy pretty wholeheartedly, which is
where we get her name. Katherine changed when she converted,
and she had to in order to move to the
next stage of her life marriage with Peter. So, in
addition to all those stellar qualities that we just mentioned,
the alcoholism, the poor manners, Peter is also just a
(04:23):
really really weird guy. He's obsessed with soldiers and military stuff,
but not in a good sort of air to the
throne way, more like a little boy, yes, overgrown little
boy way. He plays poppets in bed and makes her
play them as well. By the way, like a lot
of these details I got from Virginia Rounding's biography of
(04:44):
Katherine the Great, which is pretty great. Puppets in bed
definitely a good detail to know about someone. He drinks
a lot, as we mentioned, and it's not just sullen drinking,
it's carousing until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes
forcing kath Her to come along with them. And they
have nothing in common. She's smart, she's charming, she's intellectually curious.
(05:08):
He's none of those things, and the divide just grows
the longer that they're together. In her memoirs, she describes
herself as a miserable creature during this time in her life,
and she is of course being pressured or even bullied
by Elizabeth to have a son. They need an air,
and the court treats her as what she is, just,
(05:29):
you know, a baby making machine, a vessel for this air,
and so she's kept fairly isolated. Elizabeth puts spies in
as her ladies, and she's not really allowed to have friends.
She's supposed to be concentrating on one thing, and one
thing only. As soon as she develops the friendship, even
the lady is sent away and she's supposed to get
(05:49):
back to the task at hand. The only problem is
they don't really know how to have sex, and it's
possible that Peter had impotence problems but he may just
have not known what he was doing at all. Just
so Marie Antoinette and her husband, That's all I could
think of exactly. So their marriage isn't consummated for a
long time, and only then it's because it was arranged
(06:11):
for Peter to learn the ropes from this young widow,
which I can't understand how they drafted someone for that
job now that he's able to perform. Peter and Catherine
do engage in conjugal activities, but they hate each other,
so it must have been really awkward, not to mention,
not very fun, so they don't do it very often,
(06:35):
and in the eyes of those watching her so carefully,
it's not often enough that she'll produce this air. So
again an arrangement is made, but this time for Katherine.
She had grown rather close to a man at court,
Sergei Saltikov, and this relationship is now permitted or even encouraged. So, surprise, surprise,
(06:56):
Catherine gives birth to this much desired son, named him Paul.
There's a question was it Peter's child, Was it Sarage's bess?
Are actually that it was Peter's child. He apparently was
a lot like his father when he had some of
his some of his similar interests. He like Prussia a lot,
not that that would necessarily be inherited, but interests in
(07:18):
the Russia. So immediately after Paul's birth, Elizabeth whisks him
away and she's the one who raises this spoiled, sickly
air whatever Catherine may have wanted from him. And she
had another child, a daughter named Anna Petrovna, not to
be confused with other Anna Petrovna, as we may have
talked about in seventeen fifty seven. She probably was not
(07:41):
Peter's kid um, but handsome Stanislav Poniatowski's another lover, and
he will come into play in our next podcast. That
Anna died before she reached her second birthday, and she's
never spoken of again, which is strange. But speaking of
more illnesses, a Liz of that the Empress had been
ill for quite some time. It's possible she had epilepsy.
(08:05):
She definitely had some form of a dima, and she
knew she was dying. She died on December seventeen sixty
one after a nosebleed. She may have hemorrhaged to death,
and Catherine acted respectfully after the Empress's death, she wears mourning.
She praised publicly for her and this is a smart
move people. You know, people like that sort of thing.
(08:27):
Remember how angry people were when Elizabeth the Second of
England apparently didn't show enough grief after Princess Diana died. Peter,
on the other hand, thought it was a good idea
to play a game behind the hearse that involved a
lot of running and watching his cape swish about, and
then he would hang back for a little bit so
he could run some more, and once he caught up,
(08:48):
he would do the same thing over and over again.
So picture this. There's his aunt's coffin, people in mourning
for their most pious autocrat, and then their new ruler
who's gleefully playing childish games in a funeral procession. It
was horrifying, and it was a very good example of
the kind of man that Peter was. So people are
(09:09):
immediately thinking, how can we get rid of this guy?
Who can we replace him with? He obviously has problems,
and so some think it's time to bring back Ivan
the sixth, who is that sad little baby growing up
in the prison that we mentioned in an earlier Actually,
we did a whole podcast on him earlier, and some
people think that, no, forget, forget this strange boy who
(09:32):
has grown up in prison. Let's enthrone Catherine because she's
actually very impressive. And she resists though, and that's because
she has a little secret. She is pregnant again and
it is not Peter's. It was her lover, Gregory or
Loss will talk about him in our second episode and
a little bit more. The key here is that everybody
(09:53):
would know it was not Peter's baby either, so she'd
be put on the national stage, so to say, and
be revealed as pregnant. It would be devastating for her hopes. Yeah,
the sex ceased as far as Peter the Third goes.
She manages to hide her pregnancy the entire time. No
one figures it out. And when Alexei was born in April,
(10:15):
she hands him over to one of her servants so
he's out of the way. Maybe we're clearing a path
to the throne. So Catherine's not going to stage a
coup quite yet at least, and so we get to
experience a little bit of Peter the Third on the throne.
In February seventeen sixty two, there's a bit of a
class shake up when Peter declares that there will be
(10:37):
no more compulsory service for nobles during peace time, and
nobody knows what to think of this. The nobles are wondering,
is this good for us? Well, yeah, we don't have
to have service. But on the other hand, this is
how we would rise in the ranks. The surfs are
not quite sure how it affects them. It's a decision
that was made without any thought, which describes a lot
(11:01):
of things that Peter does. Actually, his first possible mistake
wasn't angering the church by secularizing monastic property, but his
biggest one dealt with the Seven Years War. Russia had
almost beaten Frederick of Prussia after years of fighting and
so many Russian soldiers dying. Peter stops the war, makes
(11:22):
peace with Prussia, and they offer him land and he
won't even take it. You know, no, no, you keep
it Prussia. So all those soldiers died for nothing, and
it became clear that Peter cared much more for Prussia
than he did for Russia, especially when he ignores the
things that are important to them, like, you know, learning
their language, and he skips the coronation ceremony, which was
(11:45):
a huge deal, you know, people want to celebrate when
there's a new person, and it also had some religious
overtones that that needed to be there for the Russian
people to be behind him. So ultimately, even Peter's good
deeds as emperor, like he does get of the secret police,
for example, people don't pay any heed to that. It's
completely ignored because here's this guy making disastrous decisions for
(12:09):
the country and not even seeming to care. And there
are more warning signs he won't share his power at
all with Catherine, and people are beginning to worry that
he might get rid of her in favor of his mistress.
And remember, people really do like her. She's devout, she
clearly loves her country, and the general sentiment is that
they would be better off with her at the Helm
(12:31):
than this guy who's now dressing his military in Prussian uniforms.
Plus he's drinking more than ever, and he doesn't know
anything about business. He's keeping bad company, he's getting bad advice.
He's just in this terrible downward spiral. And the last
straw is a a very fancy dinner with a lot
of impressive people, at which Peter calls Catherine a fool
(12:54):
in front of all of them, and then repeats it
in case everyone hadn't heard, humiliating her in this brutal way,
she's in tears. Someone else has to distract everyone from
what's going on. But Peter is the fool and he
is not cut out for the job of ruling all
the Rushes. So with everybody hating Peter the third, it's
(13:15):
time for some action, and there's a conspiracy afoot to
crown Catherine now that that baby's out of the way,
and she's the one heading up the conspiracy. Surprise, surprise,
she has thirty officers ten thousands of alterns according to
Virginia Roundings book, and she has financial support from not
only Russia but Denmark, and a very detailed plan about
(13:38):
how this is going to go down. Unless you feel
bad for Peter, he's been told about the coup, he
just misses it, not having much respect for the formidable
ambitions and talents of his neglected wife, and in true
Peter style, he stays up partying until four am, completely
unconcerned and just a note on Catherine, she will never
(14:00):
ever ignore rumors about conspiracies or coup. She knows better,
and so Peter is not in St. Petersburg when the
coup takes place, and it doesn't go quite according to Plant.
Catherine has this great rundown for how everything is supposed
to go, but things don't fall into place. One conspirator
is arrested and the others have to hurry away before
(14:23):
he reveals what they're about to do. Catherine herself leaves
her apartment so fast that she's still wearing her nightcap.
She changes out of that nightcap and gets all fancy
and goes to regiments she already knew supported her, and
they swear allegiance to her. And it's a bit of
a domino effect. When she've got the first one, you
just move on to the second. And at the Church
(14:44):
of Our Lady of Kazan, site of her wedding, she
is proclaimed Empress of all the Russias and names her
son Paul as her successor. More people swear their allegiance
at the Winter Palace. So Peter's people tell him about
the coup, but he doesn't even believe it, So he's
a real an example of a dim historical figure. He
even looks for Catherine at their house at Montlosier, Well, Russia.
(15:08):
Is busy trying to crown her. I mean, he's looking
around for her like a check hivancy, and she is
long gone, Peter, She's never coming back. She proclaims that
Peter the Third endangered Orthodoxy, Sully's, Russia's military glory, and
undermined the Empire's institutions. I think that last one is debatable,
(15:29):
but I will give her the first two, even if
she goes on herself to endanger the Orthodox Church, as
we'll see in our next episode. But when she parades
in front of the people, it's in a tricorn hat
and a guards uniform, carrying a saber. This is a
woman who understands the importance of signifiers and of ceremony,
unlike Peter. No silly Kate games for her. So you
(15:52):
might wonder how is Peter dealing with this now that
he finally has accepted that it might be for real.
He's not dealing with He's just drinking. He's thinking up
more out their ideas. And then he finally realizes, yes,
she really has gotten him, and he starts sending letters
asking for forgiveness, promising that he'll change, and then simply asking, well,
(16:16):
can I at least get a Holstein with my mistress
and back out of the whole thing. She doesn't reply
to the first few, and to the last she simply
sends him an abdication letter to sign. It's pretty cold, Katherine.
He's stripped of his uniform and sent away to an
estate later to be transported to Schlusselburgh, which is where
(16:36):
they kept Ivan. Sixth. She does send him his pug
for company, which made Candice very happy, but she denies
his request for his mistress. You only get so much Peter,
and Catherine deposed him on June sixty two. She's crowned
September seventeen sixty two, and just a little note on
(16:56):
Catherine's crown, it has more than four thousand diamonds and
some giant ruby as well. Nice. So the people and
the soldiers get very very drunk though after the coronation,
and they almost riot, so sort of an inauspicious start.
I would say celebration plus vodka sounds very auspicious to me.
But as far as Peter being imprisoned, he's still drinking
(17:20):
with his guards, and he's miserable over his reduced circumstances.
He's getting very very sick, very often with some digestive ailments,
and he doesn't want to use the bathroom in front
of his guards, which is understandable. So one of the
brothers of Catherine's lover or Love writes in a letter
to her this very cryptic comment, I fear that he
(17:44):
might die tonight, but even more I fear that he
might live. And that's supposed. We get another letter from
the Orlovs that's very vague and almost incoherent, the bottom
line being there was an argument Peter was killed. They
don't remember what happened. Sounds like a bad story that
(18:07):
Catherine doesn't announce Peter's death until the next day and
gets natural causes colic, inflammation of the bowels, and apoplexy.
But when his body is displayed, it's obvious that something
very very bad happened to it. He has a black
face and you can see the blood through the skin,
which seems a little like he was poisoned. That would
(18:28):
explain some of those ailments exactly. And they're also strangulation
marks on his neck, so clearly not just not so
natural a case of colic. And she didn't go to
the burial, and he wasn't allowed to be buried in
the illustrious burial place of his forebears. Either people think
that she killed him and their son would grow up
(18:51):
thinking that she killed him. But did she The consensus
seems to be that she definitely knew about it, and
she never said it explicit, please go murder my husband,
but she okayed it and her wishes were clear, and
she would protect the men who committed the crime and
reward them for it. And Catherine believed that it was
(19:12):
her destiny to rule, that it was God's hand guiding
her life to that purpose. But I think she did
her best to help it along. So that brings us
to our next topic, which is going to be Catherine
in power will get to discuss all those interesting things
that happen when she's finally empress in her own right,
(19:32):
and that brings us to listener mail. Our first letter
is a correction from Laura and our Oscar Wild podcast.
We said the Oxford College of Magdalen like Mary Magdalen,
it should be pronounced Maudlin, and she says it's another
little Oxford oddity. Not sure if it's done just to
(19:54):
torture those tourists who don't know and ask after the
college only to receive the confusing answer there, so Magdalen Bridge,
but no college. Very weird and very Oxford. So thank
you Laura, and thank you England. So we've also got
a lot of really nice Hawaiian postcards since our episode
on Hawaii, including three so beautiful postcards. I think just
(20:18):
look at them all day from Vicky from Hawaii, and
I think it just sort of made us want to
take a nice island vacation, right I was staring wistfully
at them for a few minutes at my desk before
I brought them over to Sarah's. Yes, if you have
mail you'd like to send us, we have a tricky
way of making you find our address on the house
Stuff Works homepage if you'd like to send us email
(20:40):
with history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're
also on Twitter at Miston History and we have a
Facebook fan page if you'd like to keep up what
we're doing day today, and please check out our homepage
at www dot house stuff works dot com For more
on this and thousands of other times fix visit how
(21:00):
stuff Works dot com and be sure to check out
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