Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas Highnesses with wisdom and a preference for all things Russian, including the Orthodox faith.

With such assets working in her favor, Elizabeth was sure she would breach the divide in this household; but she very soon saw that it is as difficult to engender reciprocal love in a disparate couple as it is to institute peace between two countries with opposing interests. In the world at large as in her own house, misunderstanding, rivalry, demands, confrontations and rifts were the rule.

From threats of war to local skirmishes, from broken treaties to troop concentrations at the borders, it happened that, after the French armies enjoyed a few victories in the United Provinces, that Elizabeth agreed to send expeditionary forces to the borders of Alsace. Without actually engaging in hostilities with France, she wanted to encourage it to show a little more flexibility in negotiating with its adversaries. On October 30, 1748, through the peace treaty of Aachen, Louis XV gave up the conquest of the Netherlands and Frederick II retained Silesia. The tsarina left the field, having gained nothing and lost nothing, but having disappointed everyone. The only sovereign who was pleased with this result was the king of Prussia.

By now, Elizabeth was convinced that Frederick II was entertaining in St. Petersburg, within the very walls of the palace, one of his most effective and most dangerous partisans: the Grand Duke Peter. Her nephew, whom she never could stand, was becoming more foreign and more odious by the day. To cleanse the atmosphere of Germanophilia in which the grand duke was submerged, she set out to eliminate from his retinue all the gentlemen from Holstein, and to remove the others who might try to replace them. Even Peter’s manservant, a certain Rombach, was thrown into prison on a trumped up pretext.

Peter comforted himself after these affronts by indulging in