The widow and the boy

Jean-Marc Nattier painted this woman in 1717, while Peter I still lived. She holds a sceptre she did not yet wield alone. The ermine and the French painter’s polish belong to a consort, not to the coup that would make her empress eight years later. Do not use the portrait as a likeness from 1725. Use it as evidence of how far Marta Skowronska had already travelled: from a Baltic childhood to a European court style, still in her husband’s lifetime, still one death away from a throne that had no named heir.

The painter was French; the sitter was not yet empress. Keep the date in view: 1717 is a consort’s likeness, eight years before the Guards made her a sovereign, and it should not be asked to do 1725’s work.

She was born on 15 April 1684, Old Style 5 April, a peasant of Baltic — probably Lithuanian — birth. Orphaned at three, she was raised by a Lutheran pastor in Marienburg, now Alūksne in Latvia. When Russian forces took the town in 1702, during the Great Northern War, Marta was taken prisoner. She was handed to a close adviser of Peter’s. A short time later she and the tsar became lovers. That is the documented road. Later gossip about camp and laundry is not required to make the rise startling. A prisoner of 1702 would be crowned empress-consort in 1724.

In 1703, after the birth of their first child, she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church and rechristened Catherine, Yekaterina Alekseyevna. She became Peter’s inseparable companion and, in February 1712, his wife. On 18 May 1724, 7 May Old Style, she was crowned empress-consort. The ceremony announced a status. It did not announce a succession. Peter died on 8 February 1725, 28 January Old Style, without naming an heir. Catherine’s candidacy was supported by the Guards and by several powerful individuals. The Holy Synod, the Senate and the high officials of the land almost immediately proclaimed her empress of Russia. A peasant widow sat where the law of 1722 had imagined a chosen successor. The chooser had not chosen. The Guards had.

Quite naturally, in Britannica’s phrase, Prince Aleksandr Menshikov ruled in her name. He had been Peter’s favourite, a new man whose rise the previous chapter already sketched; this page needs him as a governor, not as a 1698 portrait in Dutch oil. He headed the collaborators who put Catherine on the throne. He did not keep the government as a private holding. Soon he was forced to share power with other dignitaries of Peter’s reign. In February 1726 Catherine created the Supreme Privy Council, named six of Peter’s former advisers as its members, and effectively transferred control of government affairs to it. The Senate and the Synod, Peter’s main administrative instruments, lost political weight. A widow’s reign became a council’s reign with a widow’s signature. That was not nothing. It was not personal autocracy either.

Catherine I’s government is easy to skip in a hurry toward more theatrical years. That would be a mistake. The council was a first attempt, after Peter, to answer the second problem of the last page: who plans, who directs, who sits in the ruling circle. Six men were not a constitution. They were a bid to keep Petrine business moving without a Petrine temperament on the throne. Taxes, diplomacy and the new capital still needed signatures. The Guards still needed to believe they had chosen well. Catherine, who had learned the court as a companion rather than as a colonel, did not reinvent the empire in two years. She held it, through Menshikov and then through a council, until death reopened the file Peter had left blank.

The boy in armour is Peter II, in an anonymous eighteenth-century Hermitage likeness. It is a formal claim that a grandson can look like an emperor. It is not a drawing from the January morning he died. Shortly before her own death, Catherine appointed him her heir: Pyotr Alekseyevich, son of the tsarevich Alexis who had perished in prison in 1718. She died on 17 May 1727, 6 May Old Style, in St Petersburg. The Supreme Privy Council proclaimed the grandson emperor. An immature youngster, in the sources’ wording, now wore the crown his grandfather had not settled.

Peter II fell under the influence of his chamberlain, Prince Ivan Alekseyevich Dolgoruky. That family’s grip on the Supreme Privy Council brought about Menshikov’s disgrace and exile. The favourite who had made a widow into an empress discovered, as the last chapter warned, that a ladder can be climbed down. Surikov would later paint the fall as a candlelit family in a wooden room; that picture belongs a few paragraphs on, as later art, not as a witness. What the council years show is simpler. A boy emperor was a prize. The Dolgorukys meant to keep him. Peter II was to wed the chamberlain’s sister. It looked as if that ambitious family would rule in fact. Then biology, which had already done so much in this dynasty, did more.

Peter II died on 18 January 1730, 29 January New Style — on the day set for the wedding. Sudden death, not a manifesto, crossed the Dolgoruky plans. A childless death on a marriage morning is the kind of fact later painters cannot resist. Resist the extra dialogue. The political result is enough. The council that had proclaimed a boy now had to proclaim someone else. The widow’s line through Elizabeth would wait. The boy’s line ended before the feast. Between Catherine’s proclamation in 1725 and this January death, the empire had been governed by a favourite, a council of Petrine names, and a chamberlain’s kin. None of those arrangements had been Peter’s written will. All of them had been possible because he had not written one.

Vasily Surikov painted Menshikov in Berezovo in 1888: exile as a dark interior, children, a candle, a century and a half of hindsight. It is historical theatre. It cannot recover the temperature of a northern room in the late 1720s, and it should not be asked to. Use it for the shape of a fall — Peter’s new man reduced to a family around a table — and then put it back in the Tretyakov’s century. The documented fact is disgrace and exile after a boy’s court preferred other names.

A widow lasted two years; a boy lasted three; the wedding that was meant to lock the throne in place became the day it emptied again.

Stop here, before Anna, before conditions, before the next bargain with autocracy. The widow and the boy are a complete lesson if they are not rushed into the next coup. Catherine I showed that the Guards and Petrine collaborators could crown someone Peter had loved and the old houses had not planned for. Peter II showed that a council could swap a favourite for a princely clan and still lose the body the clan had married in prospect. Elizabeth, Catherine’s daughter, and Peter III, Catherine’s grandson, would later wear the crown; those reigns are not this page. This page is the first unstable succession as it was lived: a Baltic orphan in ermine, a Menshikov government that had to become a council, a grandson dead before the feast.

What the two reigns did not do was settle the questions the last chapter posed. The succession was still a crisis waiting for a death. The ruling circle was still a council of whoever could seize a child’s household. The Guards had tasted kingmaking and had not been punished for it. The next offer would try to bind an empress with paper before she entered Moscow. Paper, in 1730, would meet the same service world that had just watched a wedding collapse into a funeral. They would have views about oligarchy. They would have views about a throne with conditions.

Catherine’s own biography supplies the rest of the human outline without requiring campfire tales. She had been Peter’s companion for years before the 1712 marriage; the Orthodox name and the 1724 coronation were public facts, not rumours. When he died, the Synod, the Senate and the high officials moved almost at once. That speed is the point. A machine that can proclaim a widow in days is a machine that has already decided the Guards will not be fought. Menshikov headed the collaborators. Other Petrine names then forced him to share. The Supreme Privy Council of February 1726, six of Peter’s former advisers, was the written form of that share. It undermined the Senate and the Synod as political centres even as those bodies had just made an empress.

Peter II’s claim was blood through Alexis, the tsarevich whose prison death belongs to Peter’s last chapter, not to this one. The grandson was a convenient Romanov body after a widow without a living son on the throne. Catherine named him heir shortly before she died. The council proclaimed him. The chamberlain Ivan Dolgoruky’s influence did the rest. Menshikov’s exile is the fall of Peter’s new man inside a boy’s household, not a second telling of pie stalls and Dutch portraits. The Dolgorukys meant to finish the capture with a wedding. They ran out of bridegroom. Anna’s election, Golitsyn’s paper, the service nobles’ shout for autocracy — those are tomorrow’s sentences. Today’s are shorter. A prisoner of Marienburg had been empress. A boy had been emperor. Both were gone before the decade turned.

Later her daughter Elizabeth and her grandson Peter III would wear the crown. Britannica’s Catherine I article notes those later sovereigns as a family coda, not as a plot for 1727. The coda matters only as a reminder that the widow’s bloodline was not finished when the widow died. The boy’s line was. Two years and three years: that is the whole of this page’s chronology. Everything else is method. Guards, favourite, council, chamberlain, wedding morning. Method would be reused.