Ivan Shuvalov - Love Affair With The Empress

Love Affair With The Empress

He was born in Moscow, the only son of Ivan Menshoi Shuvalov, an army captain who died when the boy was ten, and Tatiana Rodionovna. The Shuvalov family fortunes changed drastically in 1741, when Elizaveta Petrovna (Empress Elizabeth Petrovna) ascended the Russian throne with some help from Ivan's powerful cousins – Peter Shuvalov and Alexander Shuvalov. The following year, they had the fourteen-year-old Ivan attached to the imperial court as a page.

In July 1749, when Ivan was visiting his brother-in-law Prince Galitzine at his country estate near Moscow, the Shuvalov brothers arranged his meeting with the Empress, who was making a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Sabbas. The Shuvalovs were not disappointed in their calculations: the 40-year-old Empress took notice of the handsome page, who was 18 years her junior, and bid him accompany her in the upcoming pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem Monastery.

Three months later, Shuvalov was appointed a kammer-junker, and his liaison with the Empress began. Although the cousins planned to use him as a pawn in their court intrigues, Shuvalov refused to get enmeshed in their machinations. As his biographers like to point out, Shuvalov was "mild and generous to all" and "had no enemies whatsoever".

His position at court grew stronger during Elizaveta's declining years, when he served as a virtual master of petitions to her, eclipsing her previous favourite and rumoured husband, Aleksey Razumovsky. Promoted general in 1760, Shuvalov refused most other honours that the Empress wished to bestow upon him, including the title of count.