Noble Blood - Catherine the Great and her Husband the Mediocre

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Catherine the Great, Russia's most famous Empress, wasn't born in Russia—she was a minor German princess engaged to the future Emperor. But less than a year after her husband ascended to the Russian throne, Catherine overthrew him in a coup with the help of her lover in one of the most extraordinary political maneuvers in history. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand. This guy's bobo-u-u-a-m-m-m-Wyer. Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like, the paper view.

It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like... You're like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like... But listen to Los Angeles on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion is advised. On his name day celebration, the emperor of Russia, Peter. the third, rode with a large entourage from one palace to another to meet his wife, Catherine, at Peterhoff, where a large celebration that evening was to take place. Since their wedding in 1745, Peter had grown to despise his wife, and he'd been making snide remarks about his intentions to divorce Catherine and marry his mistress, a woman who people might generously call charmless and truthfully might call absolutely borish. The mistress, Elizabeth Voronstova, was traveling with him that afternoon from Iranian bomb,

along with Mikhail Voronstov, the Russian chancellor and Elizabeth's uncle, a number of dignitaries and their wives, and a gaggle of Elizabeth Voronstovas' ladies-in-waiting. At this point, Peter and his wife, Catherine, lived almost entirely separate lives, with entirely separate lovers. But for a large state event, like his name-day celebration, they would make an appearance. together. She was still his wife, and her job was to meet him outside the palace that day and congratulate him on his name day. There was only one problem. When the entourage arrived at Peterhof, no one was there to greet them. Where Catherine was supposed to be waiting with open arms and a forgiving heart, there is instead only locked doors and closed windows. The Empress was gone.

Peter and his mistress searched the bedrooms, under the mattresses, in the closets. They saw the gown that had been laid out for Catherine to wear at the ball that evening, but there was no other sign of Catherine. At that very moment, while Peter and his mistress swept through the palace looking for her, the Empress was 15 miles away in St. Petersburg, taking an oath in front of hundreds of regiments of soldiers, declaring herself to be the new sovereign of Russia. Back at Peterhof, the servants could only say that they saw Catherine leave for St. Petersburg that morning and that she hadn't returned and hadn't sent word.

After an hour of frantically running from room to room, Peter's chancellor, Mikhail Voromstove, volunteered to ride to the city to find out about Catherine's whereabouts. When Mikhail Voronstov made it to the winter palace, he saw Catherine on the balcony, waving to the hordes of people below cheering her name, cheering for Russia for their new monarch. It didn't take Mikhail too long to understand what he was seeing. What about your husband? he sputtered. You shouldn't take up arms against your husband.

Catherine only smiled. She gestured back at the screaming crowd outside her palace window, a sound that roared along with the echoing of the church bells, which had been tolling for her all afternoon. Give your message to them, sir, she replied. I only obey. McHale Verne Stove promptly returned to his home, where he wrote Catherine a letter,

celebrating the inevitability of her ascension to sovereign empress, and politely asking permission to formally retire and disappear off forever into seclusion, which he then did. Meanwhile, Peter still searched the empty rooms at Peter Hall, for his missing wife, not believing the servants when they told him that she was actually gone. I can't believe she would do this to me, he fumed, ruining my moment, ruining my name day, ruining my night. He turned to his mistress and exhaled. Didn't I tell you she was capable of

anything? Peter III was not right about very much, but he was right about that. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. One evening, a few years after they were married, but before Peter Ulrich ascended to the throne as Peter III, Catherine entered the chamber of her husband to find him playing with toys. A dead rat was hanging from the wall. The two of them still hadn't produced an air, and the failure had begun to weigh on Catherine. She saw it reflected in the faces of courtiers

and in the snide comments and increasingly cruel outbursts of the Empress, Elizabeth. Creating an air, a clear denast, denastatic, legacy was the only reason Elizabeth plucked Catherine out from her minor Prussian family to bring her to Russia to marry her nephew in the first place. The two of them, Catherine and Peter, had been married for seven years, and there were still murmurs that the marriage was unconsumated. When Catherine opened the doors to their chambers that day, she could barely walk without disturbing her husband's intricate toy soldier military maneuvers. Though he was the future Emperor of Russia, all of his toy soldiers and Peter himself were wearing the blue of the

Holstein military uniform. Peter had come to Russia as Empress Elizabeth's heir when he was 13, but he never gave up his obsession with the memory of his homeland, nor his childish fixation on the Prussian king Frederick III. The toy soldiers were in their intricate lines, but Catherine couldn't stop looking at the hanging rat, a string news, wrapped around its neck. Why did you do that to the rat? Catherine asked. Peter didn't look up from the regiment

that he was rearranging on the floor. He was hanged after a military tribunal found him guilty for treason. Catherine was silent, so Peter continued. I found him climbing up the rampart. Invasion. He ate two of my soldiers.

Catherine stared at the rat, hanged by a string loop, Its tiny eyes open and bulging, a small bloom of a red tongue protruding from its mouth. Playing with toy soldiers was the closest Peter ever came to military service. Peter spent every night in Catherine's bed, but as soon as the lights were out, he would pull from beneath the mattress a box of soldiers he'd arrange on the bed sheets, playing for hours, spreading them across the duvet until Catherine couldn't move without disturbing them. Early in their marriage, she had tried to please Peter

to appease his whims and childishness by listening to him and opening her heart to his complaints. He rewarded her by telling her on their wedding night that he was in love with one of her ladies in waiting and spending the next half a dozen years treating Catherine like a wearsome acquaintance, forcing her to listen to his middling violin recitals and making her stand guard in a Prussian uniform when he wanted to play toy soldiers with human beings.

That incident with the rat reveals just about how seriously Peter took military justice. A rat that ate two paper-mache soldiers was sentenced to death, and as the future emperor, he was judge, jury, and executioner. Catherine knew Peter well enough that, upon seeing the scene, she couldn't say what she was thinking. So instead, she went back and wrote it with a sly smile in her own memoirs. Maybe the rat had committed treason, but it hadn't been allowed to speak in its own defense on its own behalf. Even pitiable creatures, Catherine thought, should be permitted a chance to save themselves. That was the key difference between Catherine and Peter. Catherine understood that death and power wasn't something confined to silly play-acting in private chambers,

and that's why, less than a year after her husband, Peter, took the throne as Emperor Peter III, she would usurp him, becoming the Empress of Russia, the figure that would pull Russia into the modern age. Peter loved toys, but Catherine knew how to play the game. Though her fiancée remained indifferent to her, the entire Russian Empire fell in love with the future Catherine the Great when she was unconscious in her bedchamber. Back then, she was just Sophia, a young German princess brought to Russia to marry the Archduke Peter Elrith. She wouldn't become a Katerina or Catherine until she was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church when she would be given a new name, a new Russian identity.

But unlike her fiancé Peter, the young Sophia devoted herself to learning all that she could about the new country to which she now belonged. She begged her Russian tutors for longer lessons and then spent the even, pacing the icy stone floors of the palace in St. Petersburg studying. That's how she got sick, walking barefoot in the cold in her flimsy night dress, her eyes straining to make out the letters by candlelight. Her servants had seen her, and when she got sick, the whisper of Sophia's devotion spread quickly throughout the palace.

When Sophia's illness worsened, and when it seemed as though she was close to death, Her mother inquired about bringing in a Lutheran pastor for her final rights. Why would you call a Lutheran? Sophia chirped from her bed, still too weak to sit upright. Instead, she asked for her tutor in the Russian Orthodoxy. Word spread quickly. There had been doubts about bringing in a German princess to marry the heir to the Russian throne, whether a foreigner would accept Russian culture and language,

or whether she would always be secretly loyal to her homeland over. all else. After Sophia's illness, there were no more doubts. Sophia was just a minor princess from a middling family, but Russia, she understood, was her great opportunity. She devoted herself to the land, its language, its people, and its religion. Even if her husband never really loved her, Russia would. She would leave Sophia behind entirely and walk into history as Catherine. When Empress Elizabeth, the woman who had named her nephew Peter as her heir and selected Catherine to be his bride, died, Catherine sat respectfully in mourning throughout the entire funeral, while Peter couldn't resist rolling his eyes and walking around the church.

He refused to kneel or say the prayers, murmuring the entire time that the Russian Orthodox Church was ridiculous. Though he had technically converted, Peter never gave up his conviction that Lutheranism was far superior. to the, as he saw them, primitive and frivolous traditions of the Russian religion. But it wasn't just his religion that worried the noblemen about their brand-new emperor. Emperor Peter III was almost 34 years old and still acting like a child in almost every way, not limited to his lack of interest in his wife. During Elizabeth's funeral procession, Peter was tasked with walking behind the casket, wearing a long, formal black robe with a long train carried by elder nobleman.

During the procession, Peter would slow down, letting the coffin pull a distance in front of him, then stop entirely, letting it pull ahead even further. Then, all at once, Peter would sprint up ahead to catch up, causing the elderly nobleman at his train to heave and pant and ultimately give up, letting the robe flap in the wind behind the giggling emperor. He repeated this routine several times. Even foolishness could have been forgiven, though, if Peter didn't still seem loyal to Prussia and Frederick III over Russia,

the country of which he had just been made emperor. Russia had been fighting and winning the Seven Years' War against Prussia, with the help of their Austrian allies. But with Elizabeth barely cold in the ground, Peter declared that the war would be over and that there would be peace, and all of the victories Russia had made, all of the spoils of war that the Russian soldiers were finally enjoying after years of battle,

would be returned to Prussia. The soldiers were dumbfounded. Russia's allies were flabbergasted. And as if to add insult to injury, Peter insisted that his elite regiments were not the traditional Russian military uniform, but the tight-fitting Prussian costumes that he had always personally preferred.

He further humiliated his officers by forcing them to act out the soldier drills he had once perfected with his toys. And so Peter's long-suffering wife, the charming, slender, good-looking Catherine, who had worked so hard to learn Russian, who, by that point, had already born Peter a son and an heir, while she became a martyr. It didn't matter that the son's paternity might be in dispute, and, for the record, the paternity of her next two children would not be. in dispute. There was no dispute necessary. They weren't Peters. It didn't matter. No, the nation loved Catherine in all the ways they hated Peter. And when Peter forced his wife to pin the ribbon of the order of St. Catherine on the gown of his dull and common boorish mistress, the nation fell further in love with her. It's a cliche to point out that someone is so shorted that they

failed to see what's in front of their own nose. But Peter was so short-sighted, he completely failed to see the woman he was married to. He knew she was there, but he didn't know who she was. Within six months of Peter taking the throne, plans for a coup began to take shape with Catherine, as she conspired with her lover, Gregory Orlov, and Orlov's brother, Alexi. Both of them were well-liked and high-ranking soldiers in Russian forces. The Orlov brothers had been covertly converting soldiers to Catherine's cause, sharing bottles of wine and messages of her benevolence and wisdom. Catherine just needed to garner the support of a few other key statesmen, which, given her husband's general incompetence, wasn't difficult. Next, they just needed to plan when they would

make their strike. But as it happens, they didn't get to make that choice. A soldier who had heard about the upcoming coup, asked an officer if the rumors were true whether Catherine had been taken into custody and the planned revolt was over. The rumor was not true. And the officer that the soldier happened to ask was not involved in the coup. He promptly had the soldier and his superior officer arrested. As soon as the conspirators got word of the arrests, they knew the clock had begun ticking. It was only a matter of time before the soldiers were tortured and turned over more. more names. It had to be now. The officer who had made the arrests sent a message to Emperor Peter at Iranian bomb, warning him of the conspiracy. Peter dismissed the message and began practicing his violin.

Later, a second messenger came bearing news of even more unrest in St. Petersburg. Peter, who hated to be disturbed when he was playing his violin, asked the messenger to leave the note on a small table for him to look at later. He never did. Like a proverbial Nero, he literally fiddled as his empire crumbled around him. Alexei Orlov rode from St. Petersburg to Peterhof, where Catherine was staying to alert the empress that the revolution was beginning. He arrived at 5 a.m. and opened the curtains to let the light in. Matuchka, he said, little mother, the time has come. Wordlessly, Catherine emerged from her bed and threw on the nearest clothes she could find, a simple black dress, applying no makeup or powder to her hair.

She knew that there was no time to waste. She and Alexi began their ride back to St. Petersburg in his carriage, but the horses were still tired for making the journey from there that morning. Fortunately, they happened to pass a peasant farmer in his cart. They begged and emptied the coins in their pockets, and the farmer agreed to swap horses. So Alexi and Catherine continued on their frantic journey to the city with two fresh farmhorses leading the way. With the Orlov brothers by her side,

Catherine stood before the guard regiments outside St. Petersburg and said that she was forced to take on the mantle of Empress for love of the Russian people in the Russian church. The men cheered, their colonel, who was loyal to Catherine, kissed her hem. The chaplain blessed her there. Thus began an afternoon of regiments one by one declaring their loyalty for Catherine. culminating in her heroic march to the Winter Palace where the Archbishop blessed her and declared her to be sovereign Empress Catherine II. Senior regiments shed the Prussian uniforms

that Peter had forced them to wear and put on as many of their old Russian uniforms as they could find. They arrested the few officers who didn't support the new empress. Catherine had St. Petersburg, the Senate, and the church behind her. She had the crowds. But victory wasn't complete. Peter was still alive, was still miles away somewhere convinced that he was still the emperor. He still had the loyalty of his army back in Holstein, and at least temporarily, a fleet at the

island naval base of Kronstadt. It had been a long day, but it wasn't over yet. Catherine would need to capture her husband before she would truly become the sovereign leader of Russia. Peter first got word that something regarding his wife was going on in St. Petersburg from the man on the barge delivering fireworks to Peterhof Palace for the scheduled gala that night. At 9 a.m. when the fireworks man was leaving St. Petersburg, there were rumors going around that soldiers were declaring Catherine to be the empress. But then it was time for the fireworks man to leave and come deliver his fireworks so he didn't hear anything else. But then word began to trickle in, and Peter surrounded himself with advisors, debating what to do. Someone sent a messenger to Kronstadt, the naval base, to make sure that the fortress was still loyal to Peter. In the meantime, they dug up a Russian military uniform and had Peter change out of the Prussian one that he was wearing.

One faction of advisors told Peter that he should march into St. Petersburg in full military regalia and remind people of their loyalty to the emperor. Another faction advised Peter to go 70 miles to the west, away from the city, to meet up with a larger group of soldiers that he could lead back. A third faction, perhaps the wisest faction, advised Peter just to retreat to the safety of Holstein. The soon-to-be former Emperor Peter, in classic Peter fashion, did nothing.

But good news arrived. the messenger who had been sent to Kronstadt returned with word that it was still loyal to the emperor. The messenger was half right. The fortress had been loyal to Peter when the messenger got there, but in the few hours since he left and returned to Peterhoff, the Admiral of the Russian Navy, loyal to Catherine, had arrived and taken command of the fortress personally. All of the soldiers inside had followed his lead.

All the while in St. Petersburg, Catherine changed into a bombard. borrowed military uniform and began to lead her guards out of the city on a white stallion. The only part of the uniform that she was missing was a sword knot, and impertinently, a young soldier of 22 rode up to the empress and handed her his own. She asked his name. Grigory Potemkin, he said, bowing before quickly returning to his ranks. Catherine would remember that name. With very few options, Peter got into a boat with his mistress and sailed for a fort that he thought would be safe. When they arrived at Kronstadt, they found the entrance to the harbor closed.

Peter stood on the deck of the ship. Don't you recognize your emperor? he shouted at the guards. We have no emperor, the guard shouted back. Long live Empress Catherine II. Peter's boat retreated back towards Iranian bomb, where he quickly composed a letter, apologizing to his wife for everything he had done wrong in their marriage and the way he had treated her, and generously offering to share the throne with her.

Catherine received the message, and, in the 18th century version of leaving him on red, sent no reply. Peter wrote a second time, offering his abdication, if only he could bring his mistress with him to the safety of Holstein. This time, Catherine sent word back that she would agree if she got the abdication in writing, which he did. Peter declared himself incapable of ruling and officially renounced the throne of Russia for eternity. Catherine's guards captured Peter and his mistress and brought them in an old carriage back to Peterhof, where they said goodbye for the final time. The next day, Peter was spirited off to Ropesha, a summer house estate some 14 miles away, that Peter selected for his own temporary safekeeping, while rooms were being prepared for him at a more permanent fort.

fortress. Though he was a prisoner, Catherine did her best to make his stay comfortable. When he wrote to her, Catherine had Peter's own four-poster bed from a Rannian bomb, sent to him by carriage, so he could at least get a good night's sleep. But just eight days after the coup that put his wife on the imperial throne of Russia, Peter III was dead, killed in a drunken brawl or an overt assassination by the men assigned to be his guards, men which included Alexei Orlov, the brother of Catherine's lover, Gregory. There's no evidence that Catherine knew about the murder beforehand, and she did seem genuinely shocked hearing of it,

but it was convenient that Peter was dead nonetheless. Though he had been strangled, Catherine had the doctors declare that Peter had died of hemorrhoid alkali, just to keep things simple, so people wouldn't ask too many questions. Since Peter had never formally been crowned emperor, he wasn't permitted to lie in the fortress cathedral where the consecrated emperors and empresses of Russia were buried.

So instead, his remains were placed in the Nevsky Monastery. But first, Catherine prudently decided to display the body to the public, so they would know that the former emperor was actually dead, that he wasn't still secretly alive somewhere waiting to reclaim power. A giant three-cornered hat covered most of the corpse's swollen face, and a wide cravat circled the neck to cover what might have been bruising. from strangling. And of course, Peter's body was put in the blue Holstein uniform that he had so cherished during his lifetime, so that even in death, people who saw his body would remember

that he had been, at heart, a foreigner all along. Catherine may not have been born in Russia, but she was one of them. That's the story of Catherine the Great's rise to power, but keep listening for a brief debunking of one of history's most pervasive rumors about her. This part verges on sexual. So if there are extremely young children listening with you and you don't want now to be the moment that you have to explain the concept of bestiality, it's probably best that they stop listening about 10 seconds ago.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo. Woo! My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're, banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I'm sorry. I had to do it. I had to bring up the terrible, everlasting, decades-long, centuries-long, rumor that Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, who wrote letters with Voltaire and brought the enlightenment to her empire, died having sex with her horse.

She didn't. Historians tend to paint Catherine the Great as an incredibly sexual person, thanks to a handful of love affairs that she had with younger men when she was empress. Like many women in power, a number of rumors then circulated about her to try to undermine and discredit her. Consensual relationships with young men, yes. Horses, no. Catherine the Great died of a stroke when she was 67 years old, in her bed at the Winter Palace. Rarely in this podcast is the truth, less fun than fiction, and I take no pleasure in reporting a fairly standard end to an extraordinary figure.

If it cushions the blow, here's something. Although she did make it to her bed before her actual death, some historians say that the stroke she suffered before she died actually occurred while she was on the child. toilet. Noble Blood is a production of IHeartRadio and Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manke, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.