She was seventeen, and Peter the Great was holding a crown above her head. The wedding crown would not fit over the diamond-and-pearl crown she already wore. So the tsar and his chancellor held it there while she married his son.
On 25 October 1711, Charlotte Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel married Tsarevich Alexei at Hartenfels Castle in Torgau, Saxony. He was the eldest son and heir of Peter the Great. She was a German princess whose marriage would bring the Romanovs into closer kinship with the ruling houses of Europe. There was a great deal of family advancement gathered around that altar.
Charlotte was the daughter of Duke Ludwig Rudolf of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and his wife Christine Louise. From about the age of seven she had lived in Saxony, in the care of Christiane Eberhardine, the wife of Augustus the Strong, King of Poland. Their marriage was not a happy one, and Christiane Eberhardine spent her time away from Dresden, at her castles in Torgau and Pretzsch. She took particular care that the girl was raised a Lutheran, and Charlotte was confirmed in the chapel of the castle where she would later be married. The faith she would be allowed to take into marriage had been part of her upbringing long before anyone discussed her future in Moscow.
Her grandfather, Duke Anton Ulrich, had already helped arrange a remarkable marriage for her elder sister Elisabeth Christine. The family belonged to the ancient house of Welf, with an ancestry considerably grander than the territory it governed. Granddaughters could carry that ancestry into courts where a small German duchy could otherwise command very little attention. Anton Ulrich pursued the opportunities with enthusiasm.
Elisabeth Christine had converted to Catholicism in 1707 before marrying Charles of Habsburg the following year. On 12 October 1711, just thirteen days before Charlotte's wedding, Charles was elected Holy Roman Emperor. One sister was now the wife of an emperor. The other was about to marry the heir to Russia.
Elisabeth had changed her faith to marry. Charlotte would not have to. Her marriage contract allowed her to remain Lutheran. Her future children, however, were to be brought up Orthodox, in Russian customs, with their education under Peter's authority. Peter also halved the yearly allowance proposed for her and her household, from 100,000 thalers to 50,000, on the grounds that living in Russia was cheaper. Before there was a child to hold, there was already an agreement about how that child would be raised.
Charlotte had not welcomed the proposal. She wrote to her grandfather that the match might still pass her by, and that she still hoped it would. A written promise was required of her all the same. In 1709, aged fourteen, she put her name to a declaration that she submitted entirely to the wishes of her grandfather and parents, of her own free will and uncompelled. Few promises made freely have needed to say so quite so firmly. When Alexei visited her at Torgau the following year, she told her mother that he had been very polite, had said nothing in particular to her, and seemed indifferent to all women.
Peter insisted that the wedding be held quietly, without ceremony or great display. At Torgau the castle's great hall was lit with a great many candles. At one end stood a platform three steps high, hung with tapestries, its floor covered in red velvet, with an altar between two large silver candlesticks. Charlotte wore silver brocade. At about three in the afternoon the procession came down the castle's famous spiral staircase, with Charlotte beside her grandfather. An Orthodox priest from the tsar's suite spoke to the bride in Latin and to the bridegroom in Russian. Then he tried to place a crimson velvet cap, trimmed with gold braid and set into a wooden crown, on each of their heads. Charlotte's own crown was too large to allow it. Peter and Chancellor Golovkin stepped forward and held the wedding crown above her until the service ended. It had taken no more than half an hour.
The contract had made room for her faith. At the altar, the tsar made room for her crown.
The quiet wedding ended with dancing until nearly midnight, and the tsar danced too. Four days later he ordered Alexei to Torun, known in German as Thorn, to oversee supplies for Russian troops in the war against Sweden. Charlotte joined her husband there in December. Her letters home described half-burned, empty houses opposite her lodgings and the monastery in which she was living. The allowance promised in her contract rarely arrived on time or in full. By the spring of 1712 she was in tears over money, and Peter's favourite, Prince Menshikov, lent her 5,000 roubles from army funds.
In 1712 she could still write to her father that she was quite happy. By the spring of 1713, when she reached St Petersburg, neither her husband nor her father-in-law was there to meet her. Alexei was away with his father's galley fleet off the coast of Finland. There were celebrations for her arrival, but her husband did not return until the end of the summer. A public welcome and a husband's presence were separate arrangements.
In June 1714, with Charlotte eight months pregnant, Alexei left for the spa at Carlsbad. She learned of it as he walked out of the door. Their daughter Natalia was born in July, and he did not answer the news. In November she wrote that nobody knew where he was, or whether he was dead or alive.
He came back in December, delighted with his daughter, and the marriage grew worse. He drank heavily and more than once struck her when drunk, though he was sorry afterwards. He took a mistress, Afrosina, a Finnish girl captured in the war, and lived with her openly in one wing of their house. Charlotte and the baby lived in the other. He left her short of money, and rain came through the roof of her bedroom. When Peter heard of it he rebuked his son. Alexei blamed Charlotte, believing she had complained to his father.
On 23 October 1715, two days short of her fourth wedding anniversary, Charlotte gave birth to a son. He was named Peter, as she had promised her father-in-law. A few days later she developed a severe fever. She asked to see the tsar, and when he came she commended her children and her servants to his care. She died in the night of 1 to 2 November, aged twenty-one, still a Lutheran.
Alexei survived her until 1718, when he died in prison after torture during his father's investigation of him. Natalia and Peter were left without either parent. Their education had been placed under Peter's authority before either of them was born. Now there was no one else.
At Torgau, Peter the Great had held a wedding crown above Charlotte's head because her own would not make room for it. In 1727 her son became Emperor Peter II, taking the throne his father had never occupied. The bride beneath the crown had been dead for more than eleven years.
