Terrible tsarinas

«36»

Machinations around the Throne shake off the yoke of Menshikov and to liberate Peter II from a humiliating guardianship.

Alas! June 1, 1727, the young bishop Charles Augustus was carried off by smallplox. Overnight, Elizabeth found herself with no suitor, no more marital hopes. After Louis XV balked, she now had lost another pretender - less prestigious, certainly, than the King of France, but a very honorable match for a Russian grand duchess. Really, fate seemed dead set against her dreams of marriage. She lost heart, took a strong dislike to the court of St. Petersburg and withdrew, with her putative brother-in-law Charles Frederick and her sister Anna, to the palace of Ekaterinhof, at the edge of St. Petersburg, under the shade trees of an immense park surrounded by canals. In this idyllic setting, she relied very much upon the affection of her close relations to help her ease her disappointment.

The very same day of their departure, Menshikov gave an extravagant feast at his palace in honor of the betrothal of his elder daughter, Maria, to the young Tsar Peter II. The intended, bedecked and bejeweled like a gilded coffer, received on this occasion the title of Her Most Serene Highness and the guarantee of an annual income of 34,000 rubles from the State Treasury. More parsimonious when it came to compensating the Tsarevna2 Elizabeth, Menshikov only allocated 12,000 rubles to her to assuage the rigor of her mourning.3 But Elizabeth wanted to be seen by one and all as an inconsolable fiancee. The fact that she was not yet married (by the age of 18), and that only the most ambitious seemed interested in her - and only out of political considerations - was too cruel a fate to be swallowed anytime soon. Fortunately, her friends immediately set about finding a high-quality substitute for Charles Augustus, in Russia or abroad. The dear departed’s coffin had hardly been laid in the ground in Lubeck when the possible candidature of Charles Adolf of Holstein was