Catherine Dolgorukov - Relationship With The Tsar

Relationship With The Tsar

Catherine first met Alexander when she was twelve and he paid a visit to her father's estate. At the time, he saw her only as a little girl and probably forgot their visit. After the death of her father, who had left his family without resources, Catherine and her sister were sent to the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens in St. Petersburg, a school for well-born girls. The Tsar paid for their education and that of their four brothers. Alexander met the sixteen-year-old Catherine there on an official visit to the school in the fall of 1864 and was immediately attracted. One contemporary described the young Catherine as "of medium height, with an elegant figure, silky ivory skin, the eyes of a frightened gazelle, a sensuous mouth, and light chestnut tresses." He visited her at the school and took her for walks and on carriage rides. Catherine had liberal opinions, formed in part by her time at the school, and she discussed them with the Tsar. He later arranged for her to become a lady-in-waiting to his wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Catherine liked the Tsar and enjoyed being in his company, but she didn't want to become one of a series of mistresses. Though her mother and the headmistress of the Smolny Institute both urged her to seize the opportunity to better her circumstances and those of her family, Catherine and Alexander did not actually become intimate until July 1866, when she was moved by her pity for the Tsar after the death of his eldest son, Nicholas Alexandrovich, Tsarevich of Russia, and after an attempt to assassinate him. Her own mother had died two months before. That night, she later recalled in her memoirs, the Tsar told her: "Now you are my secret wife. I swear that if I am ever free, I will marry you."

The Tsar insisted that Catherine and their children remain nearby. He saw her three or four times a week when she was escorted by the police to a private apartment in the Winter Palace and they wrote to one another every day and sometimes several times each day, often discussing the pleasure they found in making love. In one 28-page letter, written when Catherine was pregnant, she asked the Tsar to remain faithful to her "for I know you are capable in one moment when you want to make it, to forget that you desire only me, and to go and make it with another woman." Twenty-nine of the previously unpublished passionate letters the couple wrote to one another were auctioned off in May 2007 for high sums. Alexander sketched Catherine in the nude, rented her a mansion in St. Petersburg, and thought of her constantly. Still, great secrecy was required. They never signed their letters to one another with their real names and used the code word "bingerle" to refer to the sex act. When she went into labor with her third child, Boris, in February 1876, Catherine insisted on being taken to the Winter Palace, where she gave birth in the Emperor's rooms, but the baby was taken back to Catherine's private residence while Catherine recovered from childbirth in the Emperor's rooms for nine days. Boris caught cold and died a few weeks later.

The relationship met with tremendous disapproval from the Tsar's family and from those at Court. Catherine was accused of scheming to become Empress and of influencing the Tsar towards liberalism. She was said to associate with unscrupulous businessmen. Some members of the family feared that Catherine's children might supplant the Tsar's legitimate heirs. The Tsar tired of hearing veiled criticisms from relatives and wrote to his sister Queen Olga of Württemberg, shortly after their marriage that Catherine never interfered in affairs at court, despite the ugly rumors about her. "She preferred to renounce all social amusements and pleasures so desired by young ladies of her age...and has devoted her entire life to loving and caring for me," the Tsar wrote. "Without interfering in any affairs, despite the many attempts by those who would dishonestly use her name, she lives only for me, dedicated to bringing up our children."

Fearing that she might become the target of assassins, the Tsar had moved Catherine and their children to the third floor of the Winter Palace by the winter of 1880. Courtiers spread stories that the dying Tsarina was forced to hear the noise of Catherine's children moving about overhead, but her rooms were actually far away from those occupied by the Empress. Though the Tsar had been unfaithful on many occasions in the past, his relationship with Catherine began after the Empress, who had had eight children, stopped having intercourse with her husband on the advice of her doctors. After the Empress asked to meet his children with Catherine, the Tsar brought their two older children, George and Olga, to the Empress's bedside and she kissed and blessed both children. Both the Tsar and his wife were in tears during the meeting. The Tsar told his family that he chose to marry Catherine soon after the death of the Empress because he feared that he would be assassinated and she would be left with nothing. The marriage was unpopular both with the family and with the people, but the Tsar forced them to accept it. He granted Catherine the title of Princess Yurievskaya and legitimized their children, though they had no right to the throne as children of a morganatic marriage.

Some courtiers described Catherine as "vulgar and ugly" and resented that she was there in the place of their dead Empress. One of them, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wrote that "the eyes, by themselves, would be attractive, I suppose, only her gaze has no depth -- the kind in which transparency and naivete meet with lifelessness and stupidity ... How it irks me to see her in the place of the dear, wise, and graceful Empress!" The Tsar, however, was delighted to finally be married to his long-time mistress and to be able to be open about their relationship. In his memoirs, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich of Russia wrote that the Tsar behaved like a teenage boy when in Catherine's presence and she also appeared to adore him. At one point in family company, the Tsar asked George, his oldest child by Catherine, if he would like to become a Grand Duke. "Sasha, for God's sake, drop it!" Catherine rebuked him, but the exchange fueled the family's fears that the Tsar planned to make Catherine his Empress and supplant his legitimate heirs with his second family. The family also resented it when they heard Catherine call her husband by the diminutive "Sasha." Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote that his father, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich of Russia, was sorry for Catherine because the family treated her so coldly.

Though they were happy together, the troubled political situation and constant threats of assassination cast a shadow over their lives together. On 1 March 1880, an explosion shook the dining room of the Winter Palace. Alexander ran upstairs to Catherine's rooms, shouting "Katya, my dearest Katya!" She was unhurt, as was the dying Empress, who was so ill she was unaware an explosion had occurred. Alexander's brother-in-law Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, who was there during the assassination attempt, bitterly resented that the Tsar had forgotten his dying wife, Prince Alexander's sister, was also in the Palace and might have been injured in the assassination attempt. A year later, on the day that Alexander was assassinated, Catherine pleaded with him not to go out because she had a premonition that something would happen to him. He quieted her objections by making love to her on a table in her rooms and leaving her behind. Within hours he was mortally wounded and was brought back to the palace, broken and bleeding.

When she heard the news, Catherine ran half-dressed into the room where he lay dying and fell across his body, crying "Sasha! Sasha!" In his memoirs, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled that the pink and white négligée she was wearing was soaked in Alexander's blood. At his funeral, Catherine and her three children were forced to stand in an entryway of the church and received no place in the procession of the Imperial Family. They were also forced to attend a separate Funeral Mass than the rest of the family.