At seven, Catherine entered the throne room and took her seat on the throne. Beside her stood the Orthodox metropolitan, Gavril; on a table lay two rings. Two armchairs, upholstered in blue velvet, awaited the king and his bride-to-be. Paul, Maria, and the entire imperial family were present. All eyes were on Alexandra, standing by her grandmother’s throne, waiting for her intended fiancé. Time passed … half an hour … then a full hour. Officials glanced at one another. Something was wrong; under Catherine II, the Russian court stressed promptness. At last the double doors opened. But it was not Gustavus, only a secretary who whispered to Zubov and handed him a paper. Zubov hurried out. The king had refused to sign the amended marriage contract in which he read the new clause reinserted by Catherine. He had reverted to his earlier position: that a queen of Sweden must be Lutheran. Zubov, increasingly desperate, tried to convince him to change his mind. Catherine, her family, and her court continued to wait.
Suspense filled the room. At first, Catherine was calm. Then, as time passed, her smile disappeared and her face became red. Nearby, her granddaughter was in tears. The hands of the clock passed nine and moved toward ten. At last the double doors opened. Zubov appeared and handed Catherine a paper. The king had changed his mind again. His last word was that he had given his word of honor that Alexandra would not be hindered in the practice of her religion, but that he would put nothing in writing and would not sign the marriage contract as long as it contained the clause Catherine demanded.
Catherine could scarcely believe what she was reading. Rising from her throne, she tried to speak, but her words were unintelligible. To some, it seemed that she was suffering from dizziness; others thought it was a mild stroke. The attack, whatever it was, was temporary, and, a minute later, she was able to announce, “His Majesty King Gustavus is not well. The ceremony is postponed.” She left the room on the arm of Alexander. Although the regent sent an apology for his nephew’s behavior, Catherine was shaken. The next morning she reappeared and spoke briefly to the regent and the king. The regent was in despair, but Gustavus, “stiff as a ramrod,” kept repeating, “What I have written, I have written. I will never change what I have written.”
Catherine refused to admit that a seventeen-year-old could defeat the empress of Russia in her own palace. More time, she decided, would overcome his stubbornness, and she insisted that Gustavus and his uncle remain in St. Petersburg for another two weeks. Gustavus agreed to an additional ten days but would not retreat from his position. In the end, there was no marriage.
Catherine’s humiliation and her effort to suppress her anger in public affected her health. Later, she learned that a strict Lutheran pastor had taught Gustavus that his subjects would never forgive him if he took a wife belonging to any but the Lutheran faith. Catherine also discovered that, during their long moments together, when the young king appeared to be wooing the young grand duchess, he was in fact attempting to convert her to Lutheranism. She wrote bitterly to Paul:
The fact is that the king pretended that Alexandra had promised him to change her religion and take the sacrament the Lutheran way and that she had given him her hand on it.… She told me with the candor and naivete natural to her how he had told her that on the coronation day she would have to take the [Luthernan] sacrament with him, and that she had replied, “Certainly, if I can, and if Grandmama consents.”
Alexandra, the bride-to-be, never completely recovered. After her grandmother’s death, her father, the new emperor, Paul, married her to a Hapsburg archduke. The marriage was unhappy, and at seventeen Alexandra died in childbirth. On November 1, 1796, Gustavus was crowned as King Gustavus IV. He subsequently married Princess Fredericka of Baden, a younger sister of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the wife of Catherine’s grandson Alexander.
The Death of Catherine the Great
ON TUESDAY EVENING, November 4, 1796, Catherine appeared in public for the last time when a small number of close friends gathered at the Hermitage. One was Lev Naryshkin, who, more than forty years before, had been proposed, along with Sergei Saltykov, as a potential father of the child Catherine urgently needed to bear, and, subsequently, had meowed like a cat to spirit her out of the palace at night to visit her lover Poniatowski. Now, still playing the role of court jester, Lev, costumed as a peddler, shuffled up to Catherine with a tray full of toys and trinkets, pretending to hawk them. His performance made her shake with laughter. She retired early, explaining that she had laughed so hard that she needed to rest.
