A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Elizabeth Petrowna
ELIZABETH PETROWNA,
The second daughter of Czar Peter the Great, was placed on the throne of Russia by the revolution of 1741. She was born in 1709, and was extremely beautiful. This, as well as her exalted rank and large dowry, occasioned her several offers; but she refused them all, and died unmarried. During the life of her father, Peter the First, negotiations commenced for her marriage with Louis the Fifteenth, but were not adopted by the court of France. By the will of Catharine, Elizabeth was betrothed to Charles Augustus, Bishop of Lubec, Duke of Sleswick and Holstein, and brother to the King of Sweden; but he died before the completion of the ceremony. In the reign of Peter the Second, she was demanded by Charles, Maigrave of Anspach; in 1741, by the Persian tyrant, Kouli Khan; and, at the time of the revolution, the regent Ann endeavoured to force her to espouse Prince Louis of Brunswick, for whom she had a settled aversion. From the period of her accession she renounced all thoughts of marriage, and adopted her nephew Peter. Her dislike to marriage did not proceed from any aversion to the other sex; for she would frequently own that she was never happy but when she was in love. The same warmth of temper carried her to extremes of devotion; and she was scrupulously exact in her annual confessions, expressed the utmost contrition for her numerous transgressions, and adhered to the minutest ceremonies and ordinances of the church.
She is generally styled the humane Elizabeth, as she made a vow upon her accession to inflict no capital punishments during her reign; and is reported to have shed tears upon the news of every victory gained by her troops, from the reflection that it could not have been obtained, without great bloodshed. But, although no criminal was formally executed in public, yet the state prisons were filled with wretched sufferers, many of whom, unheard of and unknown, perished in damp and unwholesome dungeons. The state inquisition, or secret committee, appointed to judge persons suspected of high treason, had constant occupation during her reign; many on the slightest suspicion were secretly tortured, and many expired under the knout But the transaction that reflects the deepest disgrace on her reign was the public punishment of two ladies of rank, the Countesses Bestuchef and Sapookin, who each received fifty strokes of the knout in the open square of St. Petersburg; their tongues were then cut out, and they were banished to Siberia. Madame Sapookin, who was thought the most beautiful woman in Russia, was accused of carrying on a secret correspondence with the French ambassador; but her real crime was, her having commented too freely on the amours of the Empress.
Elizabeth died on the 25th. of December, 1761, in the twenty-first year of her reign, and the fifty-third of her age.
During the reign of Elizabeth, Ivan, grandson of Peter the Great, and rightful heir to the throne of Russia, was kept by her in strict confinement.