Anna celebrated the Turkish peace – but there was little to show for it since by the Treaty of Belgrade the resurgent French forced Russia to abandon all its gains except Azov, which was not to be fortified. Anna gave Münnich a diamond-studded sword, but it was not enough: aspiring to royalty like Biron, he asked to be prince of Ukraine. ‘The marshal is really too modest,’ Anna replied tartly. ‘I would have thought he’d be satisfied with nothing less than Grand Duke of Muscovy.’ Volynsky got 20,000 roubles.
‘Extremely impetuous, a man of boundless ambition, vanity and indiscretion’, Volynsky felt confident enough to pitch his ideas on reform and on reduction of German influence to Empress Anna because she had resented Biron’s attempt to marry his son to the heiress. Volynsky suggested dismissing her favourite. Biron struck back: ‘Either he or I must go,’ he told Anna. She wept, but on 12 April Volynsky and his circle were arrested and tortured by Ushakov until his comments on Anna herself and his plans for a coup were revealed.
Volynsky was found guilty of plotting to murder Biron, Münnich and Osterman, and was sentenced to death by impalement. On 27 June, the physical ruin of the once vigorous Volynsky, many of his joints dislocated by torture, was dragged out in bandages. Spared the impalement, his tongue was cut out – then, his mouth gagged to stop the bleeding, his right hand and head were sliced off.
The flustered empress, now extremely anxious about rumours that Sweden was about to attack but grateful that ‘our trustee’ Münnich was in charge, retreated from this spectacle of butchery to go hunting.22
On 12 August, the empress returned from Peterhof in time to see Anna of Brunswick deliver a male heir named Ivan after the empress’s father. Anna effectively kidnapped the baby from the exhausted mother. But the heir had arrived just in time, for on 5 October the empress fainted after a dinner with the Birons and was carried to her bed.
Fearing what would happen if the princess of Brunswick became regent, Biron insinuated that someone else must be found to ‘keep the unruly people quiet’ – namely himself. The British ambassador Edward Finch reported the empress’s symptoms ‘strong vomitings attended with vast quantities of putrid blood’.’
Lying in the Summer Palace the empress had not specified whether the princess of Brunswick or her baby Ivan was now the heir nor, if it was to be the baby, who would be regent. Osterman retired to bed, until Anna summoned him. Arriving in a sedan-chair, he backed the baby to be tsar. But Anna prevaricated about the regency. Biron begged on his knees.
Osterman advised Anna against a Biron regency, and she herself feared that it would endanger the already hated Biron. ‘I warn you, duke, you will be unhappy,’ she said, but if he lost power, his enemies would destroy him; his only choice was to amass more. Biron summoned the grandees and charmed, threatened and bribed them into acquiescence. But Anna did not sign the decree. On 10 October she was well enough to present the baby to the courtiers: ‘Here’s your future ruler!’
On the 15th, Anna sickened, unable to pass urine. She still had not signed the regency decree. Now she called in an old servant, signed the document in front of her, told her to conceal it in a jewellery box, keep the key and not reveal it until she was dead. On the 17th, Anna was paralysed on her left side and in agony in her loins as the infection spread – but she remained awake. At around 7 p.m. she bid goodbye to the princess of Brunswick and Elizaveta. ‘Never fear, never fear,’ she murmured. At 10 p.m., Anna died at the age of forty-six.
As the doors of the death chamber swung open, the princess of Brunswick wept over the body. Biron was distraught. Procurator-General Prince Nikita Trubetskoi, newly appointed to that long-vacant office, announced the accession of the baby-emperor Ivan VI. The prince of Brunswick stood frozen behind the chair of his wife until Biron asked, ‘Don’t you wish to hear the last commands of the empress?’ Osterman read out the regency decree: Biron was the ruler of Russia. Afterwards the triumphant regent went to his rooms – and the Brunswicks went to nurse the new tsar, aged six weeks.23
The body of the empress lay in state* in the Summer Palace, where the regent chose to live until she was buried. Next morning the baby-emperor and his parents moved to the Winter Palace. Biron had noticed the passive-aggressive discontent of the Brunswicks and he immediately started to court Tsarevna Elizaveta, raising her allowance. Anna’s body was barely cold before the hatred for Biron started to bubble over. Osterman, sensing danger, retired to bed, painting his face with lemon juice and staging fake fits, but a group of noblemen were denounced for insulting Biron, who had them tortured. They implicated Prince Anton himself. On 23 October, Biron staged a humiliating public interrogation of Anton of Brunswick during which he admitted that ‘he wanted to rebel a little’. Biron threatened to send the tsar’s parents back to Germany. Agonizing over his own unpopularity, he kept Marshal Münnich close. They had dinner every night. Münnich expected to be promoted to supreme commander – but nothing happened. Biron used him to harass the Brunswicks, but this meant that the marshal was constantly visiting them in the Winter Palace. On 8 November, when he was alone with Anna of Brunswick, he told her that she was in danger from Biron and sought her permission to arrest him. He asked her to march with him. She agreed, and Münnich recruited one of his colonels, Hermann von Manstein, as chief hatchetman – then went to dinner with the regent, who, ‘moody and restless, often changed the discourse like an absent man’.
‘Tell me, marshal,’ Biron asked him, ‘in your military ventures, did you ever undertake an affair of consequence by night?’
Did the duke know what was planned that night? Was Münnich himself about to be arrested? He had to answer with his usual elan that ‘he didn’t remember but that his maxim was – “Always seize the favourable moment!”’
That moment was now. At 11 p.m., as Münnich was saying goodnight, Biron revealed that after the tsarina’s funeral he was going to place Elizaveta or Holstein on the throne and destroy his enemies. Münnich was even more ‘determined to strike his blow without delay’.
At 2 a.m., the marshal met Manstein and thirty trusted Guardsmen and together they headed to the Winter Palace. Leaving Manstein to explain the mission to the palace sentries, Münnich used a back entrance to enter the apartment of Julie von Mengden, maid-of-honour, who led him along the corridors to the apartment of the Brunswicks. Julie woke them up: the marshal was waiting. Anton asked what it was all about, but his wife told him it was nothing. She sent him to bed.
Münnich invited Anna of Brunswick to lead the troops. Instead she addressed the officers. When they filed in, the young princess told them that she ‘hoped they wouldn’t refuse the greatest mission for the young tsar and his parents – to arrest the regent whose atrocities were known to everyone, and they were to do whatever the marshal ordered’. Then she embraced Münnich and the officers kissed her hand. They set off into the night towards the Summer Palace – and Anna and her friend Julie went to see the little emperor.
Münnich told the men to load their muskets. Two hundred yards from the Summer Palace, Münnich halted his men and ordered Manstein to approach the regent’s guards, who instantly agreed to join the revolution. Münnich, ‘who liked all his enterprises to have something striking about them’, turned to Manstein: ‘Gather twenty men, enter the palace, seize the duke and, if he resists, slaughter him without mercy!’
Manstein crept inside the palace with his twenty men following silently – but he got lost in the corridors. He could not ask the servants, so he just kept going until, ‘after going through two chambers’, he came to a locked sliding door that he forced open. ‘In the chamber,’ he remembered, he ‘found a great bed in which the duke and duchess [the Birons] were lying buried in so profound a sleep that not even the forcing of the door had woken them’. Getting close to the bed, he drew the curtains, finding himself on the duchess’s side, and ‘desired to speak to the regent’. Both the Birons sat up, and ‘began to scream with all their might, rightly judging’, as Manstein put it, ‘that he had no
t come to bring them any good news’. Start naked, Biron threw himself to the ground, hoping to hide under the bed. At this Manstein ran round and, ‘springing’ on to his prey, ‘held him fast until the Guards arrived’. The duke got to his feet ‘distributing blows with his fists left and right’ which the soldiers answered with their rifle butts. They threw him to the ground and stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth, tied his hands and then carried him ‘naked as he was’ into the guardroom. Having borne him struggling and kicking through the Great Hall past the open coffin of Empress Anna, they loaded him into Münnich’s carriage. Biron had ruled for three weeks.
The shrieking duchess chased after them in her nightdress until a soldier tossed her into a snowdrift. Back at the Winter Palace, Anna of Brunswick addressed the gathered Guards and declared herself ‘Grand Duchess of Russia and the Regent of the Empire’. Münnich, imagining ‘that no one would dare to undertake the least thing against him’, demanded that the new regent promote him to generalissimus, but she replied, ‘This [rank] would suit no one better than the father of the emperor.’ Münnich could not restrain his ‘outrageous ambition’ and then wanted to be duke of Ukraine. Days later, the regent promoted her husband to generalissimus, Münnich to ‘premier ministre’ and Osterman to general-admiral – all Germans. To satisfy the Russians she appointed Cherkassky as chancellor. She most trusted Ivan Brilkin, one of her chamberlains who had been exiled by Empress Anna for facilitating her affair with Lynar. She promoted him to procurator-general. On 23 December, Empress Anna was buried – and so far, Ivan VI had reigned for just six weeks.24
The baby tsar’s throne was a high-backed chair on wheels, a pram imperial. When he was driven from the Summer to the Winter Palace, he sat on a cot on his nurse’s knee in the royal carriage escorted by a detachment of the Guards and chamberlains walking on foot and preceded by the grand marshal of the court while his young mother the regent, Anna of Brunswick, followed in her carriage.
Just twenty-two years old, ‘handsome, with a very pretty figure, extremely capricious, passionate and indolent’, Anna loved just two people in a highly unusual ménage à trois, a girl and a man. Her tiny coterie met all day for cards, sewing and chat. ‘Frank, sincere, intelligent . . . her cold exterior concealed an affable, loving and loyal heart,’ wrote her friend Ernst Münnich, the marshal’s son.
The regent now did exactly what she liked, lazing around with her hair distrait, wearing just a louche ‘petticoat and short cloak – a very simple state of undress’, while reading romantic novels. ‘Nothing was more delightful for her than to read about an unhappy imprisoned princess, expressing herself with noble pride.’
Her darling girlfriend was Julie von Mengden, daughter of a Baltic German courtier. Her confidante during the coup, Julie – or Julka – olive-skinned, dark and beautiful, received one of Biron’s estates worth 140,000 roubles and all his gilded regalia and costumes. Anna’s lover was Count Lynar, whom she met in Julie’s suite while Julie kept guard outside, barring her husband from entering. But Lynar, still Saxon ambassador, had returned to Dresden to resign so that Anna could appoint him grand chamberlain.
The British ambassador, Edward Finch, with whom the regent played cards every night, observed this ménage à trois and reported to London that Anna of Brunswick ‘loved Julia as passionately as only a man loves a woman’. Indeed ‘I should give your lordship but a faint idea of it by adding that the passion of a lover for a new mistress is but a jest to it.’ Another intimate observer noticed that the girls slept together in the same bed ‘without any other dress than a petticoat’. Yet Anna’s love letters to Lynar prove that she loved him – ‘my soul, yours till death’ – and Julie was in love with him too – ‘her heart is far away’. Their letters, which have not been published, show that this was that unusual thing – a truly circular ménage à trois – because when she wrote about ‘her’ Julie’s love for Lynar, she also wrote ‘my’ immediately above each ‘her.’ Lynar was always in her thoughts: ‘I won’t be happy until I know you’re on your way here.’
This was the ménage or something like it that had so alarmed Empress Anna five years earlier. The regent evidently wanted both Julie and Lynar, yet she was married. So they planned that Julie should marry Lynar. This meant that the Saxon lover could regularly visit the regent. Needless to say, this upset her husband and led to ‘misunderstandings which last whole weeks’, encouraged by the minxy Julie ‘who inflamed the grand duchess even more against her husband’. But, to complicate matters further, when she wasn’t sleeping with Julie or Lynar, she shared a bed with Prince Anton and was soon pregnant again.
Regent Anna was a clement ruler, yet totally out of her depth. ‘She loved to do good,’ remarked Manstein, ‘but didn’t know how to do it properly.’ Münnich was unimpressed: ‘She was naturally lazy and never appeared at Cabinet.’ When he presented her with business, she often told him, ‘I wish my son was already of age to rule by himself.’ But she did not trust the slippery marshal. ‘I don’t know who to believe,’ she wrote naively to Lynar, ‘but I’ve never had so many friends since I took the regency. Better not to know everything.’ No autocrat could ever afford to think such a thing.25
Meanwhile Biron, under interrogation in Shlisselburg Fortress, revealed that he would never have accepted the regency without the encouragement of Münnich, ‘the most dangerous man in the empire’. When he returned from sick leave early in 1741, Münnich discovered that he was premier only in name. Rising to the apogee of his power, in a career that had started with Peter the Great in 1703, Osterman cleverly exposed Münnich’s ignorance of foreign policy. When the marshal threatened to resign, the regent accepted it and placed him under house arrest. Osterman was supreme.
In July 1741, sensing Petersburg was adrift and encouraged by France, Sweden, keen to win back its lost territories, seized the moment. Citing Russian aggression, the rule of German interlopers and the exclusion of Elizaveta, the Swedes attacked Russia. Here they touched on the regent’s most sensitive nerve: Elizaveta, thirty-two years old, popular for her earthy sensuality and common touch, was a charismatic contrast to German regent, baby and minister. The Guards loved her: on New Year’s Eve, her palace at Tsaritsyn Lug beside the Field of Mars parade ground was ‘packed with Guardsmen unceremoniously calling the princess their godmother’.
The Brunswicks tried to marry her to Anton’s brother Ludwig. Elizaveta began to consider launching a coup, encouraged by the conspiratorial French ambassador, the marquis de La Chétardie, whose mission was to break the Austrian alliance. The mastermind of her intrigues was Jean Armand de Lestocq, a French doctor hired by Peter the Great and trusted by Catherine. This Lestocq, whom Manstein called ‘the most giddy man alive and least capable of keeping a secret’, fancied himself an international man of mystery. Elizaveta became the centre of a web of coded notes, signals given at balls and masked meetings ‘on dark nights during thunderstorms, heavy downpours, and snowstorms, at places people used to dump rubbish’. Lestocq, that maestro of clandestinity, liaised with the French and the Swedes. But Elizaveta was pleasure-loving and a coup was a perilous enterprise. She prevaricated.
On 23 August, the army defeated the Swedes, a victory that should have fortified the regent, yet her adviser Lynar was still abroad. As her authority leached away, Osterman advised Anna to become empress. She set her coronation for 7 December.
On 20 October, the shah of Persia, Nadir Shah,* sent a magnificent embassy, riding on fourteen elephants to Petersburg, that showered the regent with Mughal jewels, which Anna enjoyed showing to Julie. ‘The Persian ambassador had an audience with his elephants,’ the regent wrote to her lover Lynar in Germany. ‘But asks for the hand of Princess Elizaveta: what is to be done? Don’t take this as a Persian fairytale: I’m not joking . . .’ The shah was indeed deadly serious. ‘He asks for her hand or threatens to go to war.’ Osterman refused to let the Persians meet Elizaveta. Elizaveta was never going to retire to the harem of this monster but, craving his jewels
, she warned Osterman not to forget that she was the daughter of his master Peter the Great.
The poor regent was ever more ‘fretful’ and, at one of her court days, she tripped on her dress and fell at Elizaveta’s feet. Only Lynar could rescue her: ‘I won’t be happy until you’re on your way here,’ she wrote to him on 13 October. He feared that Julie was overtaking him in her affections. ‘How could you even for a moment doubt her/my love after all the signs given by her/me?’ She reassured him. Meanwhile, she dreaded the court masquerades: ‘I won’t be able to enjoy entertaining (without you my soul) because I foresee my dear Julia, whose heart and soul is far away, won’t be fun. It’s true what the song says: nothing looks like you but everything reminds me of you. I kiss you – yours till death.’
Osterman’s spies warned Anna that Elizaveta’s coup was imminent. ‘There’s so many things I want to hear your opinion about,’ Anna told Lynar about the visit of a French agent to Elizaveta. ‘Everyone gives me so much advice, I don’t know who to believe . . . Half is surely lies.’
On 23 November, the regent, holding her court day, took Elizaveta aside: ‘What’s this, Matushka – I hear that Your Highness corresponds with the army of the enemy and your doctor visits the French envoy?’ Elizaveta ‘shed abundance of tears’ and protested her innocence so sincerely that the regent believed her. That night at their card game, the marquis de Botta, the Austrian envoy, warned Anna: ‘Don’t neglect taking care of yourself. You’re on the brink of a precipice. Save yourself! Save the emperor!’
As soon as Elizaveta got home, she ‘returned to the game’ – as the French ambassador Chétardie put it – consulting Dr Lestocq and her coterie. The Guards were being sent off to the war, Lestocq was about to be arrested and the regent was about to be crowned empress. It was now or never. ‘This requires daring,’ said her most trusted courtier Mikhail Vorontsov, ‘but where is such daring to be found but in the child of Peter the Great?’ The next morning Lestocq supposedly offered her a card with a crown on one side and the nun’s veil with gallows on the other. ‘Take your choice, My Lady,’ he said.26