Elizabeth has already entered so frequently, and so picturesquely, into the story that little further introduction is necessary. She was the younger of the two surviving daughters of Peter the Great and Catherine, and she inherited the independent temper of her father. Her pretty, merry figure was one of the most piquant of the court, and she had hardly attained a precocious puberty when it became necessary to watch her movements. She had, during the last three reigns, regarded both the court and its rulers with disdain. For the belated prudery of the Empress Anne she had no respect; it was the awful threat of confining her hot blood in a convent which had for a time curbed her public behaviour. For the baby-Emperor and his foolish parents she felt contempt, and she was prepared at any time to see the wheel of fortune turn toward her.

It was, as I said, the enterprising Marquis de la Chétardie who opened for her a plausible path to the throne. I would not stress her virtue in refusing to promise to yield Russian territory to Sweden. She knew, and the Marquis ought to have known, that such a concession would have cost her the throne. But she continued to negotiate with him, and her French physician, Lestocq, assisted in the plot. Count Ostermann, the wise old German councillor who survived all revolutions at court, suspected her, and she had to use strategy. Chétardie took a villa up the Neva, and Elizabeth was fond of boating. She contrived to meet him casually and discuss the plot. She had, further, a few confidants at court, who were ready to speculate on the chances of a revolution, and she had, especially, the affection of the guards. Like her mother she was amiable with the soldiers. She held their children at the font and inquired genially about their families. Ostermann, we saw, detected the conspiracy, and Anne was directed to charge her with treasonable relations with France and Sweden, the enemies of Russia. The interview ended in sisterly tears and embraces, and the conspirators got speedily to work.

Ostermann, seeing the weakness of Anne, ordered the guard to be ready to leave for the frontier within twenty-four hours. It was probable, he mendaciously said, that Sweden was about to re-open the war. He had recently quarrelled with Elizabeth, and had no mind to see her Empress. This was on December 5th, the day after her interview with Anne. That night at ten the conspirators met to decide upon immediate action. Lestocq, the doctor, went out into the snow to see that all lights were out at Ostermann’s mansion and the palace. They were as feeble a group of conspirators as ever engineered a revolution in Russia, and Elizabeth wavered between dread of a convent and eagerness for the throne. The most active and eloquent of them was the French physician. Then there were Vorontsoff, her chamberlain; Schwartz, her music-master; the brothers Shuvaloff, gentlemen of her household; and Alexis Razumovsky, her lover at the time, of whom we will see more. They raised Elizabeth’s courage to the required pitch, and Lestocq stealthily introduced twenty grenadiers of the guard who professed that they were—for a consideration—ready to die for her. Elizabeth donned a cuirass under her cloak and slung a crucifix at her breast, and then, after a long and fervent prayer, committed her fortunes to Providence and the modest skill of her friends. Her lover was left to guard the house.

At two in the morning the party passed swiftly through the frozen streets to the Preobrajensky barracks. A small crowd of about two hundred soldiers gathered round Elizabeth and listened to her appeal to support her, the daughter of Peter, and exterminate the foreigners. They would cut them to pieces, they assured her; and she had to explain that she would have no bloodshed. Other soldiers joined them, and presently a troop of four hundred marched with her and her supporters to the palace. It was the tamest revolution Russia had yet seen. Ostermann, Golovkin, and the other leading ministers were pinned into their mansions; the few loyal guards at the palace were thrust aside; and, as I said, Anne and Julia awoke to find Elizabeth in their bedroom at the head of a crowd of grenadiers.

Anne was not of the stuff of heroines. She meekly begged Elizabeth to spare her family and not take away her dear Julia, and she and her imperial baby were put upon the sledge and driven to Elizabeth’s house. The blaze of fires in the courtyards and noise of soldiers soon roused the city, and courtiers and soldiers rushed out to study the situation. It is said of Lacy, the Irish commander, that, when a friend asked him which party he stood for, he promptly replied: “For the party that is in power.” Few were so candid in speech, but all behaved alike. They rushed to take the new oath of allegiance, and the Empress Elizabeth inaugurated her reign.

Elizabeth insisted that there should be no bloodshed, but what happened may give the true measure of such advance as this indicated. Little Ivan and his parents must, she said, receive a pension and go back to Germany. Anne and Anthony, glad to escape so lightly, started for the frontier, but a courier reached them before they had left Russia, and they were imprisoned at Riga. After a time they were transferred, still prisoners, to Oranienbaum. Whether Elizabeth was struggling with her own glimmer of a conscience or with less humane counsellors it would be difficult to say. She consulted everybody. Was her life really in danger, or might she follow her impulse of humanity and let the weak-minded couple depart? Humanity was a new and rare thing in Russia.

In 1744, when Anne expected a third baby, the deposed couple were, at the instigation of Frederick of Prussia, confined in the fortress of Schlüsselburg, and four months later they were put upon sledges and driven north. They were to be imprisoned in a monastery on an island near Archangel. When, however, they reached Kholnagory, on the coast, the state of the ice would not allow the guards to take them to the island and they were left in the village. There, on the bleak shore of the Arctic, father and mother and five children—Anne added two to the family before she sickened and died three years later—lived and slept together in a common Russian hut. The children grew up feebler in mind and body even than their parents, but Russia would have it that the pale-faced Ivan was still the nucleus of a conspiracy. He was in 1756, in his thirteenth year, removed to a remote dungeon, to await his murder under the reign of Catherine. Prince Anthony was weak-minded enough to survive the horrors for thirty years, and his children were at length released by Catherine and sent to live on a small pension in Denmark.

The “clemency” of Elizabeth—of which the decrees of the time speak—was equally exhibited toward the surviving servants of her father and her predecessor. Away with the Germans, was the cry; and a few distinguished Russians were included in the batch of prisoners who now looked forward to the customary reprisals. Old Ostermann, gouty and stoical, had fought Elizabeth, and he knew that his forty years of sound service would count for nothing. He was to be broken on the wheel. Münnich was to lose his hands and his head; Golovkin his head; and so on. A vast crowd gathered in the square on January 29th to see the “traitors” butchered. At the last moment an order of the Empress spared Ostermann the wheel and changed the sentence to decapitation. The old man moved toward the block, and a new order changed the punishment to exile. He quietly asked for his coat, and was packed off to the bleak northern region to which he had once helped to send Menshikoff. The crowd murmured when fresh orders from the Empress cheated them of the sight of blood. Münnich was sent to the spot—the very house—in Siberia to which he had sent Biren, who was summoned back to life. They met on the way, in Siberia, and bowed; and the great soldier settled down to rearing chickens and growing vegetables. The others were scattered over the bleak north. There had been no torture of witnesses—though much suborning of witnesses—and no bloodshed. Russia was improving.

While the goats were scattered, the sheep were gathered on the right hand. Vorontsoff became a leading minister, and his humble colleagues strutted also in gold lace and silks. Lestocq, first physician of the new court, was so richly rewarded with gold and favour that he imagined himself the prime spirit of the new regime, and will presently come to grief. The Marquis de la Chétardie became a saviour of Russia (which he would like to ruin in the interest of France, and indeed expected to be at least gravely weakened under the rule of Elizabeth), and soldiers kissed his hand. The guards, heavily rewarded, put on insufferable airs, and wandered insolently about the palace as if they were part owners of it. The state of the court was chaotic, and foreign envoys sent word home that Russia would sink back into barbarism.

The strange fortune of Alexis Razumovsky deserves a paragraph, since it cannot have a chapter. He was a tall, handsome Cossack, with fine black eyes and eyebrows and a rich black beard; a man in his thirty-fourth year when wealth and power were thus thrust upon him. Twenty years earlier he had been a guardian of his father’s sheep and a chorister in the church of the little Cossack village where his mother kept an inn. An imperial courier, passing through, had heard him sing, and had sent him to St. Petersburg to be trained and then got him a place in the choir of the imperial palace at Moscow. He was then twenty-two, and Elizabeth saw and appropriated him for her household. The Marquis de la Chétardie says that one of her maids first appropriated the handsome Cossack and Elizabeth got the news from her. To tell all the legends of the Russian court would need many volumes, and would offend the taste of our polite age, but no one seriously questions that Razumovsky took the place of Elizabeth’s latest lover whom Anne had sent to Siberia.

At Elizabeth’s accession he was made a Count and a Field Marshal. He was never spoiled by prosperity—“you may make me a Field Marshal,” he said genially, “but you’ll never make me a soldier”—and never interfered in politics. He took his great wealth pleasantly and generously, and drank royally. His brothers and relatives were—not by him, but by the Empress—similarly enriched, and even his old Cossack mother was brought from her inn, richly dressed, and presented at court. There was a story that the bewildered woman took her own reflection in the glass for the Empress and nervously curtsied to it; which would not flatter Elizabeth, as she was still one of the most handsome women of Russia.

Whether Elizabeth ever married Razumovsky cannot be exactly determined. It is generally accepted that she privately, at the instigation of her confessor, married him in the fall of 1742. Elizabeth openly doted on him and would always have him with her. He kept his even temper when, in her later years, she returned to her early license, and he was present at her death; after which, it is said, he was seen to burn a casket of papers which may have included a wedding-certificate.

A still greater favourite, in a different way, was Elizabeth’s nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, son of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and Anne of Mecklenburg, the elder daughter of Catherine and Peter. His mother had died of consumption a few months after his birth at Kiel, in 1728, and her sickly taint was on the boy. He was mean in body, intellect and character, and, as his father had died when he was eleven, his education had been rough. Elizabeth sent for him, gave him excellent tutors, and completely spoiled what bit of manliness he had. He was made a Grand Duke and heir to the throne—being the last male with any Romanoff blood—and, as he disliked the Empress’s feminine circle, he surrounded himself with Germans, affected a contempt for Russia, and laughed at his aunt’s amours.
Paul the First

But Elizabeth was very far from being a fool. She adopted Peter in order to keep the crown in her father’s family, making, out of dynastic feeling, a mistake which wise men like Marcus Aurelius had made. For the government of the country she chose her men well, as a rule, and she tried to put a stop to the disgraceful rivalry which had so often rent the court. At first her chief ministers were her Grand Chamberlain, Prince Tcherkasky, a corrupt old noble of the traditional school, and his son-in-law Trubetskoi. But she saw the greater merit of Michael Bestuzheff, the Grand Marshal of her household, a grave and learned man, and his able younger brother, Alexis, who was to become her chief minister.

Elizabeth herself was lazy. She let documents wait weeks for her signature and at ordinary times paid little attention to affairs. Her more resolute admirers say that she was so conscientious that she took weeks to consider a matter. She was, in point of fact, a thorough patriot, eager to maintain the work of her father; but most of her time was spent in the preservation of her health and beauty and the satisfaction of her insatiable thirst for pleasure. Her toilet took several hours every day, and it did not generally begin before midday, as she was apt to sit up with her intimate friends until the early hours of the morning. It is said that she drank heavily in her later years, but that is disputed. Her chief passion was for dress and entertainment. In a palace-fire she lost four thousand costly dresses, yet there were fifteen thousand in her wardrobe when she died. She had a large and opulent figure—a little too opulent as time went on—a face with few rivals in Russia, charming blue eyes and dark-golden hair.

One of her characteristics was a love of dressing as a soldier or sailor. She had good warrant for this in the example of her parents; and, to say the truth, she thought that no lady of her court could match her in male dress. So fancy-balls became very frequent, and Elizabeth, who was still fond of dancing and hunting until she grew too heavy, made a handsome Dutch sailor or colonel of the guard. She would change her garments three times in a ball; a dozen times in a day. Like Anne, she set her face against the old Russian debauches, and was for a French elegance, or a poor imitation of it. Luxury of every kind she encouraged, until the court shone with diamonds and gold brocade; and for her operas singers were brought from the ends of Europe. Reading was bad for the health, she said, and she avoided it.

She was, and always had been, very pious. There she differed emphatically from her father, and the orthodox clergy fell furiously upon dissenters and seceders. She observed the fasts rigorously, she knelt in prayer............