acter; and about 1754 suspicions began to be entertained that an improper intimacy had commenced between the duchess and Count Soltikof, for whose society she indicated a marked preference. The count was replaced by his friend Leon Narichkine, and he in turn gave place to Stanislaus Poniatowski, a young and handsome Polish noble, whom Catherine afterwards made king of Poland. Peter discovered or suspected the intimacy between the duchess and Poniatowski, and on his accession to the throne, 5th January, 1762, he is said to have talked of repudiating his wife. There is reason to believe that she had long cherished the desire to obtain the crown for her son and the regency for herself, and she now resolved at once to anticipate the movements of Peter by a bold stroke for the empire. She had numerous partisans both among the nobles and the people. By her liberality and affability she had completely gained the soldiers who did duty around her residence, and a conspiracy was immediately formed for the deposition of Peter. The regiments in the capital were instigated to revolt, partly by bribes and promises, partly by misrepresentations and falsehoods. The emperor, while living in fancied security, totally unconscious of his danger, was arrested 14th July, 1762, prevailed on by threats and entreaties to sign an act of abdication, conveyed to the castle of Robscha, and six days afterwards strangled by Alexis Orloff, one of Catherine's favourites. Catherine was then solemnly crowned at Moscow. Soon after, the unhappy Prince Iwan, grandnephew of Peter the Great, who had been destined by the empress, Anne Iwanowna, as her successor, and had been kept a close prisoner for eighteen years, was put to death on the plea that a plot had been formed to set him at liberty, and raise him to the throne. All competitors for the crown being now removed, Catherine set herself vigorously to carry out her schemes for the aggrandizement of Russia. She expelled the reigning prince of Courland, and set up Biron, a creature of her own in his place. Partly by bribes and partly by threats she procured the crown of Poland for her favourite, Count Poniatowski. She suppressed a dangerous insurrection in her own dominions, and carried on several successful wars with the Turks, which terminated in her acquirement of the Crimea and other provinces of the Ottoman empire. She was the moving spirit in the partition of Poland, as Russia was ultimately the principal gainer by that infamous transaction. She was preparing to take part in the revolutionary war against France, when she was seized with an apoplectic fit, and died 10th November, 1796, after a reign of thirty-five years. Catherine was undoubtedly an able and vigorous sovereign. She had a considerable taste for letters and for painting, and was passionately fond of music. She showed great favour to Diderot, D'Alembert, Euler, Voltaire, and other literary and scientific men; composed several treatises herself, and established schools in all the provinces of her empire. She also encouraged commerce, founded towns, docks, and arsenals, reformed the courts of justice, and to some extent ameliorated the condition of the serfs. But her grossly licentious life, and the fearful crimes to which her wicked ambition led, have left an indelible stain upon her memory. A very curious autobiography of Catherine was found after her death among her most secret papers. It was carefully suppressed by her family, but a copy was taken in some unknown way, and has been published (1859) with a preface by M. Herzen.—J. T.
CATHERINE de Bourbon, Princess of Navarre and Duchess of Bar, born in 1558. Her brother, Henry IV. of France, constrained her to marry in 1599 Henry of Lorraine, duke of Bar, much against her will, as she was strongly attached to the count de Soissons. Like her brother, Catherine was distinguished for her power of repartee. She continued steadfast in her adherence to protestantism, notwithstanding Henry's abjuration of that faith. She died in 1604. Her life has been written by Mdlle. Caumont de la Force.—J. T.
CATHERINE de Medicis, consort of Henry II., king of France, born at Florence in 1519, was the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, duke of Urbino (grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent), and of Madeleine de Boulogne, a princess of the house of Auvergne. Bereaved of both her parents, her mother dying in giving her birth and her father soon after, she was brought up under the care of her uncle Giulio de Medici, afterwards Clement VII., who, when she had hardly completed her thirteenth year, had her betrothed to Prince Henry, second son of Francis I. Although endowed with extraordinary qualities both of mind and person, and possessed, as the latter part of her career witnesses, of no less talent than fondness for political intrigue, she contented herself, during the lifetime of her father-in-law, with the modest position at court her noble, not royal birth, and the divided affections of her husband assigned her; and during the reign of Henry she was no less artful to secure real power by appearing to support the influence of the Guises, while she secretly directed the schemes of their enemies the Huguenots. By Henry she had five sons, of whom three successively wore the crown of France, namely, Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III. Still controlled by the power of the Guises during the reign of the first of these princes, as soon as Charles IX., at the age of eleven, ascended the throne, she asserted her independence with a high hand, assumed the title of regent, and from that time wielded the destinies of France until the close of a reign which corruption and cruelty, culminating in the fearful butchery of St. Bartholomew's day, have consigned to everlasting infamy. After the accession of her youngest son, Henry III., Catherine retained a considerable portion of her former power, and this she exerted as little to the advantage of the kingdom as destructively to the schemes of her rivals; the principal of whom, the Guises, notwithstanding her solemn denial of being concerned in their death, she has not been thought guiltless of removing by assassination. She died at Blois in 1589, leaving the kingdom in a state of anarchy, and the illustrious name she bore indissolubly and, but for her munificent patronage of arts and letters, exclusively associated with the worst crimes and the most calamitous disturbances of the period in which her family held the throne of France.—J. S., G.
CATHERINE of Alexandria, Saint, martyred during the persecution of Maximin towards the year 307.
CATHERINE of Arragon, wife of Henry VIII. She was the youngest daughter of Ferdinand, king of Spain, and of Isabella of Castile, and was born in 1483. In her eighteenth year she became the wife of Prince Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII. of England, and in five months after was left a widow. Upon her marriage with Arthur, Catherine's father had settled upon her a large dowry, a considerable portion of which, however, remained unpaid at the time of her husband's demise; and Ferdinand scrupled to pay the remainder, unless the king of England would agree to give the widowed princess in marriage to his other son, Henry, who by the death of Arthur had become heir-apparent to the throne. A threat was even held out that if this were not done the sum already paid must be refunded, and this so worked upon the cupidity of the English monarch, that he entered at once into the proposed arrangement, and procured a special dispensation from the pope sanctioning the union. The young widow, accordingly, became the wife of her brother-in-law, Henry, who, upon his accession to the throne, had his marriage with Catherine publicly ratified, both being crowned by Warham, archbishop of Canterbury. For a period of nearly t wenty years they lived together in the greatest harmony and apparent affection; but the want of male issue had ever been to Henry a source of great disquietude, and there is little doubt that his feeling on this point, together with an ardent passion which had suddenly sprung up in his mind for Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine's maids of honour, caused him to seek a dissolution of his marriage. He accordingly applied to the pope for a dispensation of divorce, which was promised, but deferred from time to time on various pretexts. Ultimately Henry took the matter into his own hands, and first of all privately married Anne Boleyn early in 1533, and then appealed for a divorce to an ecclesiastical court convened at London, where the question was publicly tried. The result was that Cranmer, then archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced, not a divorce, but a sentence, declaring the king's marriage with Catherine a nullity, because it had been contracted and consummated against the divine law; and Catherine, under the title of the Dowager Princess of Wales, retired almost broken-hearted to Kimbolton castle in Huntingdonshire, where she died in January, 1536, in the fifty-second year of her age. Whatever opinion may be formed of the motives by which Henry was actuated in seeking a divorce, it must be conceded by every one conversant with the facts of the case, that Catherine was an attached and faithful wife, an affectionate mother, a true christian, and an oppressed and most unfortunate woman.—G. A.
CATHERINE of Braganza, daughter of John IV., king of Portugal, was born in 1638, and in 1661 was married to Charles II., king of Great Britain. The marriage was highly unpopular in the country, though the princess brought with her
