Great Catherine Read online

  Chapter One

  THE SMALL, LIVELY, RATHER PLAIN LITTLE FOUR-YEAR-OLD girl walked up to the king and reached up to tug at his jacket. She had been taught to kiss the garments of older people, as a sign of reverence, but the stout, red-faced man who watched her approach with a severe expression was wearing a jacket that was too short, and this made it difficult for her to do what her mother had ordered. A look of disapproval, almost of disdain, crossed the child's regular features. Her unusually large, wide light blue eyes, bright with intelligence and sensitivity, looked fearlessly into his sternly imposing face. Then she turned and walked back to where her mother and great-aunt were waiting.

  "Why does the king have such a short jacket?" the little girl demanded in a voice that carried well even in the grand salon with its high painted ceiling and thick hangings. "He's rich enough to afford a longer one, isn't he?"

  Her mother, intensely uncomfortable and only too aware that the watchful dignitaries, military officers and titled ladies—not to mention the court chamberlain with his broad-bottomed wig and long staff, the elegantly dressed ladies of honor and chamber gentlemen, the solemn footmen in their velvet liveries—and her grandmother, the duchess, were all waiting for her to respond to the child, was silent.

  The king wanted to know what the little girl had said, and what Frederick William of Prussia wanted to know, he found out.

  Someone repeated to him the child's words. The courtiers held their breaths, the mother turning very red, her distress apparent.

  Then, to her amazement, he laughed. The king, who carried a cane to beat his soldiers with when they didn't march fast enough to satisfy him or when they deviated from his strict and detailed orders, actually laughed.

  "The little one is impertinent," he was overheard to remark. Then he turned away, and the tension in the room was broken.

  The child, Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst, was precocious and active, with an excess of energy that made her brash and often headstrong. She chattered endlessly, she was full of questions and she noticed and remembered things that made no impression on duller children. She learned to read at a very young age, and before she was four she was reading French, at least after a fashion, and writing names and dates. She knew that she was not a pretty child—and she sensed that that was all her mother cared about—but she also knew that she was clever, and that her animated conversation, high energy and cheerful disposition could bring a smile of pleasure to the faces of the adults about her, just as her impertinent question had made King Frederick William laugh.

  She was a princess of the insignificant but honorable principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, one of the three hundred or so independent political entities where German was spoken. In the year of her encounter with the Prussian king, 1733, these three hundred scattered principalities, Free Cities, bishoprics and dukedoms were bound only by the loosest of political ties, a vague and largely ceremonial union under the greatly decayed authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. Much more real than the emperor's shadowy aegis was the power of the king of Prussia, who had at his command one of the largest and most highly disciplined armies in Europe and whose territorial ambitions threatened the integrity of the smaller states that bordered his kingdom.

  Anhalt-Zerbst was among these states, a few hundred square miles of pine forests, pastureland and bog nestled between the Electorate of Saxony on the south, the Archbishopric of Magdeburg on the west and Prussia on the north. Since the early thirteenth century Anhalt had been proudly independent, but over the centuries its princely dynasty had branched out in so many directions that all its princes were impoverished, the tiny state lacking the resources to support a populous ruling house. For several generations the Anhalt princes had avoided destitution by serving in the army of the Prussian king, and Sophie's father, Prince Christian August, had followed this tradition, leading troops into battle against the French and the Swedes, devoting his young manhood to the advancement of Prussian arms though he had neither the talent nor the inclination to distinguish himself as a leader of men.

  At the advanced age of thirty-seven Christian August had married a relatively poor but well-born princess, Johanna of Holstein-Gottorp, and had taken her to live in the bleak garrison town of Stettin on the Pomeranian border, where he and his regiment were stationed. Johanna was only sixteen, a pretty, shallow girl accustomed to being spoiled by her grandmother the duchess and dismayed by the sparse social life of Stettin, where the leaders of society were grimly correct provincial military officers and tedious tradesmen's wives. Johanna and Christian August rented a house from a local businessman, settled in, and soon Johanna was pregnant.

  This at least gave her hope. If she had a son, he might inherit the principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, for the current ruler, a cousin of Christian August, was childless and likely to remain so, and Christian August's older brother Ludwig was unmarried. The birth of a son would liberate Johanna from Stettin, and might liberate her husband from having to live in thrall to the Prussian king.

  But the child was a girl — Sophie — and in giving birth to her Johanna suffered terribly. Her labor nearly killed her, and for five months she barely clung to life, in pain and no doubt resenting the disappointing child whose arrival had brought her to death's door. Sophie was put into the care of a nineteen-year-old wet-nurse, then when she was weaned she was turned over to a governess, Madeleine Cardel, who did her best to curb the little girl's overactive energies and tried to turn her into a quiet and docile child—at least for as long as she and her rather fawning governess were within her parents' view.

  Johanna, once she recovered, was soon pregnant again and this time she was determined to have a son. When Sophie was eighteen months old, her brother Wilhelm was born, and immediately he became the center of Johanna's world. Sophie was cast into the shade and neglected, while the new baby received all his parents' attention, all the more so as it became apparent that one of his legs was weak and shriveled, making it impossible for him to develop normally. Doctors were consulted, folk remedies tried; the boy was prayed over, taken to bathe in mineral springs and subjected to every kind of therapy. But little Wilhelm did not thrive, and Johanna suffered yet another severe disappointment as she watched the son she had hoped for grow up a cripple.

  Christian August now benefited from the influence of his wife's family and found himself appointed governor of Stettin. Apart from the increase in honor and status, this meant more pay (though the parsimonious general remained tightfisted with money, to the disgruntlement of his rather profligate young wife) and more dignified quarters in the four-square, gray stone castle that dominated the town. An entire story in one wing of the castle, adjacent to the chapel with its tall bell tower, was given over to Christian August and his household. Now when the family knelt for morning and evening prayers they heard the tolling of the chapel bell, and its mournful sound was to haunt young Sophie's childhood.

  When Sophie was four years old, Madeleine Cardel left Christian August's service to marry an advocate, and her sister Babette took over as governess to the princess. Babette was a treasure: clearsighted and full of common sense, she neither spoiled nor bullied Sophie but treated her with gentleness and patience, attending to the cultivation of her exceptional mind while restraining her boisterousness. Babette was good-tempered, Sophie remembered when she came to write her memoirs many years later, a "model of virtue and wisdom."* Her father, a Huguenot refugee, was a professor in Frankfurt and Babette had been well educated. She may or may not have had some grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, but she certainly knew the classics of French drama, and taught Sophie to recite long passages from Moliere and Racine. In a household where conventional Lutheran piety and a rather grim sense of duty were all-p
ervasive, Babette represented rationality, tartness and a touch of the acerb.

  "I had a good heart," Sophie wrote of herself as a child, "I was full of common sense, I cried very easily, I was extremely flighty." Full of physical daring but with an overdeveloped sense of shame—the product of overzealous religious teaching—she was easily frightened and often hid to avoid undeserved punishments she feared would fall on her. Her mother was quick to blame her and slow to recognize when she herself had been wrong; consequently Sophie had more than her share of slaps and blows, which wounded her sense of justice and left her fearful.

  Liking to run up and down stairs, jump on the furniture and dash headlong from room to room, Sophie was bound to hurt herself. Once she was playing with scissors and the point of one of the blades went into the pupil of her eye; fortunately her sight was undamaged. Another time she was playing in her mother's bedchamber where there was a cabinet full of toys and dolls. She reached up to unlock it—and in doing so she inadvertently pulled the entire heavy cabinet over on top of her. By this time the doors had opened, however, and she eventually crawled out unscathed.

  When Sophie was five years old Johanna gave birth again, this time to another son, Frederick. Two years later she had a fourth child, also a boy, but he lived only a few weeks. Wilhelm, the crippled heir apparent to the Anhalt-Zerbst dominions, continued to preoccupy his mother, who sent him to take the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, Karlsbad and Teplitz, and worried over him and his brother to the neglect of her daughter.

  Brittle bones seem to have plagued the family, for at the age of seven even the normally robust Sophie threw her spine severely out of alignment when a violent fit of coughing caused her to fall on her left side, and for weeks she was bedridden with severe pain. The cough persisted, along with shortness of breath, and when after nearly a month the child was allowed to get up, she was so crooked that she looked deformed, her right shoulder being much higher than her left, her spine zigzagging down her back in the shape of a letter Z.

  Johanna's first reaction was one of chagrin; she felt mortified enough having a crippled son, a disfigured daughter was an embarrassing liability she did not need. Sophie's condition was kept secret from all but Babette and a few trusted servants. No one knew what to do; severe dislocations were no rarity in the early eighteenth century—they were often inflicted deliberately on tortured prisoners—but the only man in the vicinity of Stettin who was versed in treating them also served as the local executioner, and Johanna did not want it known that she had hired him to treat her daughter.

  In the end, in the greatest secrecy, the executioner was smuggled into the castle. He examined Sophie and gave his recommendations: first, that a young virgin be found who would spread her spittle over the princess's back and shoulder every morning, and second that Sophie wear a brace on her back, a torturous contraption like a stiff corset that kept her in one position night and day and that she was not allowed to remove except to change her underwear.

  Johanna, who invariably exhorted her daughter to "suffer her illness patiently" and became cross when Sophie moaned and complained, insisted on this regimen of saliva and corsetry; when after many months the executioner allowed the stiff brace to be removed, Sophie's torso had returned to normal.

  But it was not enough to train her limbs; her intellect too had to be carefully straitjacketed, lest it grow in awkward directions. Babette Cardel remarked that Sophie had an "esprit gauche"—an eccentric and highly individual turn of mind. She was opinionated and contrary, and she "resisted all resistance," as she herself put it later, remembering what she had been like at five and six. Sophie had "a perverse spirit which took all that was said to her in the opposite sense," and in an age when all children, and most especially little girls, were expected to be obedient and submissive, her "perverse spirit" presented her teachers with a challenge.

  Besides Babette, who knew how to govern the young princess with reason and gentleness, Sophie had a German teacher, a French dancing-master, a music teacher and a Calvinist schoolmaster who taught her calligraphy. The schoolmaster she dismissed as "an old weak-head who had been an idiot in his youth," and the unfortunate music teacher, "the poor devil Roel-lig," as she called him when she remembered him later, made himself ridiculous by going into raptures over the booming tones of a bass singer he always brought with him to her lessons who "roared like a bull." Having no ear for music herself, Sophie envied those who did, but had no respect for Roellig or the other inferior provincial pedants who were put in charge of her.

  Toward Herr Wagner, however, who taught her religion— along with a smattering of history and geography—Sophie had more complicated feelings. Herr Wagner was an army pastor who saw it as his duty to impress on the flighty, cheerful princess the seriousness of life, the wickedness of the world and the dread of hell. He presented her with a large German Bible with hundreds of verses underlined in red ink and told her to memorize them. Hour after hour she sat with the book on her knees, repeating to herself phrases about the wages of sin and the mighty armor of God and the heart as "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Messages about grace and mercy were mixed in her child's awareness with visions of torment and divine vengeance— and in fact the vengeance of the Lord may well have become confused with the vengeance of Herr Wagner, for when Sophie stumbled over a word or forgot a verse, he punished her harshly and conveyed a degree of disapproval that made her feel not only that she had failed but that she was well nigh worthless.

  Tragedy, evil and sin were Herr Wagner's themes, and he did his best to implant in Sophie a lively sense of pessimism toward earthly life and a lively fear of the Last Judgment, when God would mete out a terrible retribution to those who had not gained his mercy. Sophie took Pastor Wagner's messages very seriously indeed, and wept bitterly and privately over her shortcomings. When it came to the logic of history, however, and the teachings in the Book of Genesis about the creation of the world, her curiosity and natural argumentativeness outstripped her piety.

  She argued with her instructor "heatedly and in a very opinionated way" about how unjust she felt it was for God to damn all those who lived before the birth of Christ. What of those wise philosophers of antiquity, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, whose sagacity had been prized for several millennia? she asked. Was not God deficient in fairness in condemning them? Herr Wagner quoted chapter and verse, but Sophie continued to defend Aristotle and Plato. Finally the pastor went to Babette and demanded that she give Sophie a good beating to make her see the truth and obey her elders.

  Babette gently explained to Sophie that it was not appropriate for a child to express a contrary opinion to an older authority such as Herr Wagner, and told her to submit to his view. But before long teacher and pupil were at odds again. This time Sophie wanted to know what came before the biblical creation.

  "Chaos," Herr Wagner announced with what he hoped was finality. But what was chaos, Sophie demanded, and would not be satisfied with what he told her.

  Exasperated beyond endurance, and no doubt angry at Babette for refusing to beat the recalcitrant princess, Herr Wagner once again threw up his hands and called in the governess, whose intervention restored peace until the next point of debate arose, over the unfamiliar word "circumcision." Sophie naturally wanted to know what it was, and Herr Wagner was naturally reluctant to tell her. Babette too told her to stop asking, though it took all her art to persuade the persistent child to be content with ignorance, and it was not lost on Sophie that Babette found the situation amusing.

  Herr Wagner's examinations were nearly as terrifying as the Last Judgment. "I was horribly, persecutorially questioned," Sophie remembered years afterward. Worst of all was the burden of having to learn by heart what seemed an infinite number of Bible verses as well as long passages of poetry. To help her concentrate on what she was learning, at the age of seven all her toys and dolls were taken away. (She didn't miss them much; she preferred the active rough-and-tumble games the boys played and had n
ever liked dolls, amusing herself at odd moments by playing with her hands or folding a handkerchief into fanciful shapes.) "I believe it was not humanly possible to retain all that I had to memorize," she recalled many years later. "Also I do not think it worth the trouble."

  The strain on her nerves was great; eventually she began to despair. When autumn came, and the days grew very short in the far northern town of Stettin, and the mournful chapel bells tolled at twilight, she took to hiding behind the hangings and crying as though her heart would break. The tears were for her sins, and for the errors she made when she recited her lessons, and the love she missed. Babette found her in her hiding place, got her to admit at least some of what was troubling her, and went to the pastor to complain. She told him that his methods were making Sophie overly melancholy and frightened about the future, and asked him to be less severe. Neither Babette nor anyone else addressed the more serious problem that was troubling Sophie: the knowledge that her mother did not love her, and her resentment of the crippled, pampered Wilhelm, who, in her view, often deserved the slaps and blows that she received.

  Inwardly Sophie was in despair, but outwardly she shone— when in the presence of others. Her brash cheerfulness, her innate tendency to "chatter on boldly and endlessly" in adult company, her striking intelligence combined to make a strong impression on those outside her family circle. She became accustomed to being praised for her cleverness. When her mother took Sophie to Brunswick to visit her great-grandmother the duchess, she was coaxed into reciting the long dramatic pieces she had memorized, and was stroked and complimented so that she came to see herself as unusual. "I heard it said so often that I was smart, that I was a big girl now, that I really believed it." King Frederick William, who had had his first taste of Sophie's precocity when she was four, continued to encounter her as she grew older and followed her progress, asking after her whenever he was in Stettin or when Christian August went to Berlin.