Terrible tsarinas

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An Autocrat at Work and Play couple. While Sophia seemed to be waiting for her suitor to undertake some sort of gallant initiative, the foolish grand duke talked about nothing but the fine qualities of the Prussian Army, on parade as well as in combat, while systematically denigrating everything about Russia, from its customs to its history to its religion. Was he simply trying to assert his independence? As though in compens ation, Sophia began to display the contrary view on every point, and seemed to find the history and the traditions of her new homeland more and more appealing.

Both Vasily Adadurov and Simon Todorsky, the tutors appointed by Her Majesty to instruct Sophia in the Russian language and religion, praised her diligence. Enjoying the intellectual effort, she would study the most difficult problems of vocabulary, grammar and theology until late at night. Then she caught cold, and took to bed with a fever. Terrified that they might fail in their objective, after coming so close, Johanna accused her of shirking her duties as a princess preparing herself for marriage; she told her to get up and get back to work.

The Francophile clique took this development as a positive sign. If the perspiring, shivering Sophia should fail to recover, a replacement bride would have to be found - and another candidate might be more inclined to favor an Anglo-Austrian alliance.

Elizabeth hotly declared that she would refuse any Saxon candidate, come what may.

The men of medicine recommended bleeding the patient;

Johanna was against it. Elizabeth, under pressure from her personal physician, Lestocq, cast the deciding vote and Sophia was bled 17 times in seven weeks. That was how they saved horses, and that is how they saved her. Back on her feet but still very weak, she went straight back into the fray.

She was to celebrate her 15th birthday on April 21, 1744, but she was so pale and thin that she was afraid she would make a