Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Like any other pupil, Alexander’s mental development was determined as much by what he saw and heard outside the classroom as within. His grandmother’s Court was still as brilliant as any in Europe and the Empress had ensured that Alexander made an early appearance as a princely figure. By the age of thirteen he was accepted as a young dandy, for Catherine insisted on her elder grandson having brocade coats from France, buckled shoes from England, Italian coloured waistcoats, lace ruffles from the Netherlands. Alexander was handsome and the Empress’s enthusiastic comments on his appearance at state occasions in her letters show how justified she thought her indulgence to have been. But neither Protassov nor La Harpe felt such extravagance good for the Grand Duke’s character; and they may well have been right in their private strictures.

  Life at Gatchina with his father and mother was markedly different. Grand Duke Paul ran his estate as a miniature kingdom of its own, owing more in style to Prussia than to France. He was not an eccentric hedonist. Although every minute of their lives was regulated by his orders, the peasants around Gatchina were well cared for, with churches, hospitals and schools of their own. But Paul delighted in military masquerade. He built up a private army, dressed in Prussian uniforms and drilled by the codes introduced in Peter III’s brief reign. The whole region around Gatchina rang with the harsh commands of army discipline. Reveille was at four in the morning, there were ceremonial drill parades or field exercises throughout the day, formal entertainments in the evening, a curfew by ten at night. Routine was varied by a church parade on holy days and by an occasional mock naval battle on the lake whenever the Grand Duke remembered that he was an honorary Admiral of the Russian fleet. Guests from St Petersburg seem, for the most part, to have found Gatchina boring though to some it appeared ominously sinister. Alexander and his brother enjoyed their visits. They had far less freedom than at their grandmother’s Court, they had to wear the tight-fitting green uniform of the Gatchina regiment, but they were treated with exaggerated respect by the officers of their father’s household.21 There was no rift between Alexander and his father in these days; and the young Grand Duke gave the impression of being as much at home in the soldierly encampment of Gatchina as in the ballroom elegance of the capital.

  Sometimes the suspicions of Paul towards the Empress led to open conflict between Gatchina and the Winter Palace. At the end of 1786 Catherine accepted an invitation from Potemkin to visit southern Russia and the Crimea so as to see for herself the lands in which he had fought his Turkish campaigns. Since these rich territories were now part of the Russian Empire he hoped to inherit, Paul asked to accompany his mother. Catherine refused; but she proposed to take with her Alexander and Constantine. Paul was very angry, and Marie Feodorovna joined him in protesting; for a region so recently freed from the Tatars and the Turks did not seem to them a fit place in which boys of nine and seven should pass the winter months. Eventually Providence intervened: on the eve of Catherine’s departure, Constantine went down with measles and it was anticipated (wrongly) that Alexander would catch it from him. Their physicians insisted they remain in St Petersburg. Foreign visitors found the Empress sulking over the way in which her will had been thwarted.22 When, that autumn, war was renewed against the Turks Paul begged to be allowed to lead his troops into action; but Catherine would have none of it. While Potemkin and Suvorov were winning fresh laurels from their campaigns in the south, Paul and his regiment remained at Gatchina, with manoeuvres every Wednesday and some interesting experiments with artillery to pass the time. Although it is true that the Gatchina troops were helping to protect the capital against a threatened invasion from Sweden, this was not sufficiently heroic for Paul. He bitterly resented his mother’s veto, swore vengeance on her favourites and barely hid his envy of the military commanders on the Turkish Front.23

  But in these years of triumph against the Turks there was little that Paul could do, except send congratulations to his mother. The end of the 1780s saw the influence of Gregory Potemkin, Viceroy of New Russia and Prince of Taurida, at its zenith. He was Catherine’s most faithful lover – for fifteen years tactfully seeing that she had a substitute ‘admirer’ whenever he was absent from the Court – but he was also Russia’s most effective colonial entrepreneur, adding thousands of miles to the Russian Empire; and it was on this count that Catherine wished Alexander to honour him. Alexander dutifully did what was expected of him, and the Empress could hardly restrain her pleasure at the compliments which Potemkin paid the Grand Duke: he had, so Potemkin told his grandmother and she informed Grimm, ‘the appearance of Apollo combined with great modesty and much character’ and he added that ‘if you could choose from a thousand candidates for his position, it would be difficult to pick an equal and impossible to find someone better.’24 On 28 April 1791, Potemkin gave the last and greatest festival to Catherine at the Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests attended the celebrations which included, not merely dancing and a massive banquet, but a performance of two plays and two ballets and a choral cantata in honour of the Empress. More than two hundred crystal candelabra lit the three great halls of the palace; and to her delight the Empress noted Alexander leading the first quadrille. But extravagance on this scale encouraged extraordinary notions of luxurious living in the mind of a lad of thirteen. Protassov commented tartly in his diary on Alexander’s constant quest for pleasure and he was especially irritated to find the Grand Duke amusing himself with mimicry, one of the social accomplishments which the Empress had always found most endearing in Potemkin.25 Perhaps it was as well for Alexander’s adolescence that the celebrations proved to be Potemkin’s final gala. Soon afterwards he set out for the southern provinces and caught malaria. To Catherine’s grief he died on 5 October.

  Betrothal and Marriage

  Catherine was frightened as well as saddened by Potemkin’s sudden death. She was sixty-two, ten years older than her favourite, and although gossip still credited her with sexual adventures, there was no doubt that she was, in many ways, prematurely aged. At times her legs were so swollen that she was confined to a wheel chair; and her letters no longer reflected the intellectual curiosity of earlier years. Naturally she recoiled from news of revolution in Paris: it seemed as if her whole creed of enlightenment was betrayed. But she rejected other forms of speculation as well as dangerous thoughts from France. She could not, for example, read Gibbon and it does not seem as if she appreciated the power of Burke’s reasoning. Sadly her legend condemned her to a lustre she could no longer burnish.

  Conscious of her failing powers, Catherine increasingly turned her thoughts towards her family and the dynasty. Already she had convinced herself that Alexander, with his good looks and charming manners, was warming the hearts of all the young ladies in St Petersburg society; and she may well have been right, even though he only celebrated his fourteenth birthday at the end of the year. But, in that bleak winter which followed Potemkin’s death, she resolved to push Alexander precipitately into manhood. A bride must be found for her favourite grandson. She would establish him with a Court of his own, near to her at Tsarskoe Selo: it would be gratifying to live long enough for great-grandchildren to visit her at the palace.

  There was, moreover, another problem nagging at her mind. What she knew of Paul and his armed camp at Gatchina disquieted her. ‘I can see into what hands the Empire will fall after my death’, she once grimly remarked, after a meeting with her son, ‘We shall be converted into a province dependent on the will of Prussia.’26 It was as if her husband’s ghost had come to mock her. But was it necessary for Paul to succeed her? Ever since Peter the Great’s day, it had been accepted that the sovereign possessed the right to determine to whom the crown should pass: a formal decree of February 1722 had abolished primogeniture as a principle of succession. Were Alexander to marry and consolidate his hold on the affections of the people, there was every reason for Catherine to publish an edict which would debar Paul from the throne and proclaim her eldest grandson as heir to the Empire.
The thought had already occurred to many at Court, and indeed to Paul himself. Rumour said a proclamation would be made on the day Alexander was married: but the Empress was slow to give any sign of her intentions.

  In August 1792 Catherine, commenting in a letter to Grimm on the way in which so many European thrones were threatened by the revolutionary virus, allowed herself to paint a brief and idyllic picture of Alexander married, crowned and assured of his future whatever might happen in other lands. A few weeks later she sent the Countess Shuvalova, one of her ladies-in-waiting, to southern Germany with instructions to escort two daughters of the Crown Prince of Baden to St Petersburg: Louise celebrated her fourteenth birthday that autumn and her sister, Frederika, was only eleven. They arrived in St Petersburg on the evening of 31 October. Catherine was delighted with Louise, and told Grimm that she hoped Alexander would not let the opportunity slip, although she acknowledged that ‘people are unaccustomed to marriage so young here’. Alexander, she added, ‘does not think of it. He is an innocent at heart and it is a devilish trick I am playing on him, for I am leading him into temptation.’ She seems to have relished the prospect.27

  Alexander, quite clearly, did not. Poor Louise, overawed by the Empress and all the splendours of St Petersburg, later admitted in her journal that the first meeting with her proposed husband had not gone well: ‘He gave me an unfriendly look’, she wrote.28 Everyone else welcomed the two girls, especially Louise. She reminded many people at Court of her aunt, who had been married to Paul in 1773 only to die in childbirth three years later. But this tragic echo from the past was not seen as any impediment to the new marriage, not even by Paul (who had much loved his first wife). The only doubt was whether Alexander at fourteen was ready for married life. Protassov confessed sadly in his diary that he was not, but he consoled himself with the thought that in temperament Louise would prove an ideal partner for his pupil. He admired her beauty and her voice, commenting favourably on her grace of movement and ‘quite remarkable modesty’.29

  Catherine was too ruthless a matchmaker to share Protassov’s uneasiness. She could see, readily enough, that Louise was soon completely infatuated with Alexander, and she brushed aside her grandson’s manifest lack of ardour as natural reticence. There was no cause for worry. Five weeks after Louise and her sister arrived in Russia, Catherine sent the inevitable progress report to Melchior Grimm:

  Monsieur Alexander will behave very sensibly and with prudence: that is to say, at this moment he is just beginning to show some tender affection towards the elder princess from Baden, and I do not doubt that it will be fully reciprocated. Never was there a pair more suited to each other – as lovely as the day, full of grace and spirit. Everyone takes a delight in smiling on their budding love.

  If some of the ladies of St Petersburg confided in their journals and letters that, on closer acquaintance, they found Princess Louise a little shy and retiring, who can wonder why?30

  To be transported from sober and respectable Karlsruhe to the palaces of Petersburg was in itself a bewildering experience for a girl of fourteen. Nearly half a century ago Catherine herself had made a similar transition, and she sympathized with Louise in her moments of home-sickness. This seemed the regular fate of German Princesses: it was not many years since Alexander’s mother had been fetched over from Stuttgart. To Catherine there was, of course, no comparison between her own wretchedly contrived betrothal and the opportunities awaiting Louise; nor did she see the difficulties posed for the Princess by the rival Court at Gatchina. The Empress invariably minimized the importance of Paul’s wishes, and her exchanges with Marie Feodorovna had always ended with such a courteously phrased letter from her daughter-in-law that Catherine assumed she, too, might be ignored. Neither Paul nor Marie Feodorovna was consulted over Catherine’s marriage project for their son though both travelled up to St Petersburg from Gatchina two days after the arrival of the Badenese Princesses. Marie Feodorovna was, indeed, as enthusiastic about Louise as the Empress herself: ‘The eldest seemed charming to me’, she wrote, ‘I found her not merely pretty but possessing such an attractive figure that even the most indifferent person would love her’31; and she added that she was particularly pleased by her affability and candour. Paul, too, welcomed Louise and was at first amused by the high spirits of the two girls. But what was acceptable in the capital seemed out of place at Gatchina; and, although Louise endeavoured to please Alexander’s parents, it was difficult for a child of her years not to find the atmosphere of a military camp oppressive, and even harder for her not to show her real feelings. The fact that Alexander himself appeared untroubled by the contrast puzzled her; but she was too much in love with him – and too accustomed to an affectionate family circle – for this to worry her deeply.

  By the following spring all was settled. At Easter Protassov noted in his journal a conversation with Alexander in which the Grand Duke said that he had a ‘special feeling’ for the Princess, that he felt conscious of it as soon as she came into a room or happened to be standing near him. On Easter Day itself, seven months after their first meeting, the two young people at last dared to embrace each other – twice. Louise dashed off a letter home which was dewy with rapturous innocence: ‘These are the first two times I have kissed him’, she told her mother, ‘You cannot imagine how funny I found it embracing a man who was neither my father nor my uncle. And what seems odder still is that it feels different from when Papa kisses me: he was always scratching me with his beard.’32 More solemn occasions soon occupied her attention. In the second week of May 1793 Louise was received into the Orthodox Church and took the names Elizabeth Alexievna; and on the next day she was formally betrothed to Alexander, and created Grand Duchess. Once more the Empress rushed into rhapsody over the event: ‘Everyone said they were two angels pledging themselves to each other. You could not see anything lovelier than this fiancé of 15 and that fiancée of 14.’ And she added, with a typical lapse into litotes, ‘Besides that, they do not love each other at all badly either.’ (‘Outre cela ils ne s’aiment pas mal.’)33

  There followed several days of festivity. Grand Duchess Elizabeth was happy, confiding amused comments to her young sister. Alexander found that he did not spend so much time at his studies, a development which saddened him little; and no one had seen the Empress so pleased with herself since Potemkin’s death. The high point of these celebrations was a production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal which one of Alexander’s tutors, presumably Samborsky, had translated the previous summer. Catherine enjoyed the performance at her private theatre in the Hermitage, but she was startled to find her grandson popularly given credit for the adaptation and she demanded an explanation. Alexander, ‘blushing deeply’, was forced to admit that though the translation was undoubtedly his tutor’s, certain sallies written into it had been modified at his own suggestion. The Empress poured out the whole story to Melchior Grimm; but she does not appear to have been certain whether to chide the tutor for encouraging Alexander in such frivolities or to be amused by the reputation which the Grand Duke had acquired in St Petersburg as a student of English.34

  Unfortunately there were other forms of self-pretence in his life that summer. Protassov found him appallingly ignorant of what was happening elsewhere in the Empire; and La Harpe complained he had been entrusted with a system of education which required several more years of concentrated work. Saddest of all, poor Elizabeth began to see flaws in Alexander’s character: a caustic edge to his agreeability; an impatient, almost bored, dismissal of the high romantic note she sought for their relationship; a negative insensibility to the foolish things which delight an adolescent girl. She did not, for one moment, doubt she had found the love of her life, as she assured her mother by almost every postbag; but she confessed to being worried by ‘a nothingness in his attitude’ and, as the summer months went by, she became lonely and miserable.35 In the first days of August her sister was packed off to Baden, apparently because she had caught the eye of the last favouri
te of the Empress, Platon Zubov, a twenty-six-year-old exquisite improbably commissioned in the Preobrazhensky Guards; but Elizabeth’s sorrow at the injustice to her sister soon gave way to indignation at tales of her own conduct. It was said that, while staying in Pavlovsk, she had pressed her charms prematurely on Alexander, climbing into his room through the window. Gossip travelled even as far as Baden and the much maligned Elizabeth was forced to write a hot denial to her mother. Jealous tongues, as the young Grand Duchess soon perceived, made mischief with ugly ease. But what did they find to envy? The simplicity of her grace and charm at a Court which was raising splendour to vulgarity? Or was it, perhaps, her unresponsive suitor with his slender figure and fresh-blown complexion? Most likely it was more selfish interests, the thought that he and she might reign after Catherine’s death and a whole generation be thus robbed of its span of sovereignty. There is little doubt that those who gambled on Paul’s speedy accession, clustering around him at Pavlovsk and Gatchina, had no particular desire to see Alexander’s marriage prosper too happily too soon.36

  The Empress knew something of these intrigues but paid them little attention. When at midsummer it was rumoured Alexander would be sent on a grand tour of Europe and the marriage delayed, Catherine testily denied the story: ‘The wedding will be here and it will take place before Christmas’, she wrote on 5 August. It was, she insisted, ‘a love match’and she continued to praise Elizabeth’s beauty – the clarity of her blue eyes, the classic line of her profile, the quiet melody of her voice. The Empress had, in fact, decided that Elizabeth’s appearance closely resembled her own in those distant days when she had herself arrived from Germany. Portraits of half a century ago were hunted out to prove the point. The likeness was not immediately apparent and some at Court were embarrassed. A dreadful doubt began to steal into their minds: the Empress had such a waspish sense of humour.37