Terrible tsarinas

«67»

Terrible Tsarinas Frederick of Holstein, was the legitimate heir. But little Charles Peter Ulrich’s mother had died, and the baby was only a few months old. Drowning in sorrow, Elizabeth hesitated to look beyond this mourning. After a number of disappointing adventures, broken engagements, evaporated hopes, she had taken a dislike to the Russian court and preferred the isolation and even the boredom of the countryside to the bustling din and superficial glitter of the palaces.

While she reflected thus, with a melancholy mixed with bitterness, on an imperial future that no longer concerned her, the emissaries of the Council were hastening to bring word to her cousin Anna Ivanovna. She received them with a mocking benevolence. In truth, her spies and the well-wishers that she still had at the court had already informed her of the contents of the letters which the delegation would bring her. Nevertheless, she did not indicate in any way what her intentions might be; without batting an eye, she read the list of rights that the guardians of the regime dictated she should renounce, and said that she would agree to it all. She did not even seem to mind being required to break with her lover, Johann Buhren.

Misled by her dignified and docile air, the plenipotentiaries never suspected that she had already made arrangements to have her favorite join her, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, as soon as she signaled to him that the road was clear. This possibility seemed all the more likely since she was getting word from her partisans in Russia that she had considerable support among the minor nobility. This group was eager to move against the upper aristocracy, the verkhovniki as they were popularly called, which they accused of encroaching on the powers of Her Majesty in order to increase their own. Rumors were even circulating that in the event of any conflict, the Imperial Guard, which had always defended the sacred rights of the monarchy, would be disposed to intervene in