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On August 8 1768, William Richardson, tutor to the family of the newly arrived British ambassador, attended the laying of the foundation stone of St Isaac's Cathedral in St Petersburg. Here he observed from a distance the Empress Catherine, who, as he approvingly recorded, was "taller than the middle sized, gracefully formed, but inclined to corpulence". Something about her was teasingly unclassifiable: "Indeed, with regard to her appearance altogether, it would be doing her injustice to say she was masculine, yet it would not be doing her justice to say it was entirely feminine." Catherine herself was to note in her memoirs her own "masculine" cast of mind; as an exceptionally effective ruler in a country where women had traditionally exercised authority in private, she outraged conservatives, such as Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, who saw her as the most egregious illustration of the monstrous regiment of women that had engineered the "ruination of the morals of Russia".
The quintessential enlightened despot, Catherine had a capacity for flamboyant theatricality, which also extended to strategic demonstrations of simplicity. Famously abstemious with regard to most personal pleasures, she took part with gusto in the transvestite masquerades at the court of Empress Elizabeth, and dressed up as a colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards to lead troops from St Petersburg to Peterhof in pursuit of her husband, Peter III, to consolidate the coup d'etat of June 28 1762. As Virginia Rounding notes, "she was deliberately creating symbols on this day, conscious...