Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  As summer passed into autumn, Catherine speeded the arrangements for the wedding. She had declared her intention of having ‘a simple yet lofty’ palace built for her grandson and his bride in the park at Tsarskoe Selo; it would be close to her own favourite residence and no more than fifteen miles from St Petersburg itself. But the building could not be finished for more than a year. There was no need to wait for it: Alexander and Elizabeth could set up a miniature Court of their own in St Petersburg that winter. And there was no need either to wait for the Grand Duke to complete his studies: he would have a household of fifteen dignitaries, but he would still receive tuition and Protassov would keep a record of his academic progress. By the end of September everything was ready, but for Elizabeth there was another disappointment. A sudden illness prevented her father from setting out from Germany and her mother chose to remain with him, perhaps from wifely concern but just possibly because she had once been a contender for the hand of Grand Duke Paul, and Russia did not have for her the pleasantest of associations.

  The marriage was celebrated on 9 October 1793, in the Court Church. The bridegroom was eleven weeks short of his sixteenth birthday and the bride ten months younger. Three ladies-in-waiting and their maids were expected to inform both Catherine and Marie Feodorovna of the relations between the newly married couple. Not that Catherine had any doubts: ‘The dearest children were so happy’, she wrote effusively to Elizabeth’s mother in Baden. And to one of her oldest friends, the Prince de Ligne, she was just as enthusiastic: ‘It is a marriage of Cupid and Psyche’, she declared contentedly.38 While Juno was thus preening herself at the Hermitage, her grandson and his bride were moving in as neighbours along the Quay. With fifteen hundred rooms from which to choose in the Winter Palace, it was not difficult to find a suite for them. They spent the first winter of married life in rococo splendour, far removed from the real Russia which neither of them as yet knew. From their windows they could look out across the frozen Neva to the tall slender spire of St Peter and St Paul, a church within a fortress, soul and symbol of the city.

  Alexander and Elizabeth were, indeed, far too young to assume the responsibilities of married life. They were intelligent children well-tutored but badly schooled, for neither had experienced any consistent formal education. Their temperaments were remarkably similar, as General Protassov had noted soon after Elizabeth’s arrival in Russia. Both possessed an endearing charm of manner and a spirit of obstinate independence which tended to be weakened by excessive trust in the loyalty and judgement of a favourite companion. In his tutor’s eyes, Alexander was a naturally kind young man with many virtues though inclined to indolence and prevarication.39 Protassov permitted himself to hope in his journal that Elizabeth might impart some of her own energy and liveliness to her husband; but this, of course, was asking too much from a girl of fifteen already intimidated by the unconventional conventions of an alien Court. It was easier for her to share Alexander’s delight in trivialities, and far more natural. To dance the polonaise and the mazurka and to discover the excitement of the new waltzing made every ball during Elizabeth’s first winter as a Grand Duchess the occasion for a letter home to Karlsruhe. There were evenings when she would sing, Alexander play the violin, his elder sisters join in duets, and the great Empress nod approvingly; while on other nights a play, an opera or a ballet would be presented in the little theatre at the Hermitage, with two generations watching Catherine uncertainly before venturing to applaud. Not all the moments of amusement were so public or so inhibiting. Alexander, to the consternation of his tutors, would waste hours playing with his newest toy, a marionette theatre: and there is a refreshing innocence in some of Elizabeth’s frolics. In a letter written to her mother when she was three months short of her sixteenth birthday, the newest Grand Duchess describes the fun she found in sitting up late at night with two of her ladies-in-waiting as they scared each other silly with tales of ghosts and haunted rooms. In Catherine’s palaces such a pastime required strong nerves indeed.40

  St Petersburg Society was puzzled by this second Grand-Ducal Court. Alexander’s domestic household contained more dignitaries than Paul’s had ever done: did this, then, mean that he was now heir-apparent? It was an important question. If Paul’s claims to the succession were to be ignored, good sense recommended cultivating the friendship of Alexander and his young wife. On the other hand, neither Paul nor Marie Feodorovna was likely to accept exclusion without a bitter struggle, and Catherine seemed in no hurry to make public her intentions. It would be rash to fall foul of Paul’s temper and, as yet, Alexander lacked the outward assurance of a prince at the foot of his throne. There was no general transference of loyalties away from Paul’s Court to the new Court; and many of Alexander’s own advisers believed any decree of succession which denied hereditary right would weaken the Crown for generations.

  Yet rumours persisted in the capital that the Empress was about to proclaim Alexander her successor. It was thought that the most likely time for an announcement of this kind would be as soon as he became a father. Throughout the summer of 1794 the unfortunate Elizabeth was embarrassed by pointed enquiries about her health, and at one moment Marie Feodorovna asked Alexander outright if his wife was pregnant; but there was no immediate prospect of any child being born to the young couple. As if to mock poor Elizabeth’s expectations, Marie Feodorovna herself gave birth to a seventh baby in January 1795, a girl baptized Anna; and within eighteen months she had yet another child, the future Tsar Nicholas I. Even the Empress began to show more interest in the growing family at Pavlovsk and Gatchina than in Alexander and his wife.41

  It is not surprising that, at times, Elizabeth’s letters home seem low spirited. To many in St Petersburg she now appeared a person of little significance. In her loneliness she became pathetically attached to the wife of the marshal of the Court, Countess Varvara Golovina, a woman twelve years her senior with whom she established an indiscreet relationship. Within less than twelve months of her marriage, Elizabeth was writing passionate notes to the Countess, apparently with Alexander’s complaisance. Child-husband and child-wife remained emotionally immature so long as Catherine lived, although each was genuinely fond of the other.42

  La Harpe and Protassov both saw the danger for Russia and for Alexander personally of a deep conflict between the two Grand-Ducal Courts. They did what they could to prevent it. Yet, by the end of 1794, Catherine had become so suspicious of La Harpe’s ‘Jacobin’ teachings that she decided to put an end to his services in Russia and encourage him to return to Switzerland. He had, however, one last task of importance to perform. In May 1795, on the eve of his departure La Harpe drove out to Gatchina. He later described how he had ‘an interview of two hours’ with Paul ‘in his study, during which I unburdened my heart’, urging a reconciliation between the father and his sons. Paul was moved by the occasion. Unexpectedly he invited La Harpe to stay at Gatchina for a ball which was to be given in Constantine’s honour, even lending the much-abused tutor a pair of white gloves so that he might join in the polonaise without embarrassment (a gift which the Swiss republican preserved for the rest of his days).43 It is not clear how much La Harpe revealed of Catherine’s intentions over the succession, a subject on which she had spoken to him several times in the preceding eighteen months; but Paul took his advice to heart, and made a point of seeing more of Alexander and Constantine in the following year.

  Even without La Harpe’s intervention, Alexander would almost certainly have sought to improve relations with his parents. Catherine still did not speak directly to him of her plans for the future, but she had already tried to enlist the support of Marie Feodorovna and some councillors of state for a decree of exclusion. Alexander disliked the project. He was terrified of his father and unwilling to become a talisman of contention. Moreover, at heart, filial respect and a sound measure of common sense made him loyal to his father’s claims. He diligently attended the manoeuvres at Gatchina throughout the summer of 1795 and on into 1796.
Although there was much in Paul’s way of life which he found onerous, he preferred the members of the Gatchina officers corps to the sycophants around his grandmother in St Petersburg; and once he was at Gatchina or Pavlovsk, he submitted readily enough to his mother’s influence. Only Elizabeth fared badly from the family reconciliation, for she found it difficult to hide her dislike of Paul’s mania for parades and was too high spirited not to resent Marie Feodorovna’s domineering manner.

  There was another question which drew Alexander and Paul closer together. Both were critical of Catherine’s Polish policy, which by 1794 had encroached so ruthlessly on traditional liberties that it produced the first modern patriotic revolt against Russia, with Warsaw emerging as the revolutionary capital of eastern Europe. Although Russian troops dealt drastically with the Polish rebels and Catherine seized the opportunity to advance her Empire’s frontier to the rivers Niemen and Bug, both Paul and Alexander felt that the final destruction of the old Polish Kingdom was morally wrong and politically injudicious; and they sympathized with the Polish patriot leader, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who was captured and imprisoned by the Russians in October 1794. Yet Catherine was not unduly troubled by their disapproval. She was convinced that Alexander harboured no treasonable thoughts, and she had long since given up caring what Paul said to the troops of his shadow army within the walls of Gatchina.44

  The Last Years of Catherine II

  Strangely enough, it was Catherine who by accident ensured that Alexander’s interest in Poland became more than a mere passing sympathy for a romantic cause. For, eighteen months after her grandson’s marriage, she brought to St Petersburg two members of the Polish nobility, the Princes Adam and Constantine Czartoryski. It was inevitable that two charming and courteous newcomers, with topics of conversation fresh to him, should immediately attract the young Grand Duke’s attention. He was, at that very moment, beginning to find friends outside the narrow circle prescribed for him by his family and tutors. Naturally the Czartoryski brothers found themselves brought more and more into Alexander’s company. A close friendship rapidly developed between Prince Adam Czartoryski and Catherine’s eldest grandson, and the Polish aristocrat became in effect a successor to La Harpe as Alexander’s principal mentor and confidant.

  This was certainly not the Empress’s intention. The Czartoryskis were one of the most enlightened Polish aristocratic families, inclined in the past to co-operate with the Russians.45 But in 1794 they had supported Kosciuszko, and were now therefore liable to lose their estates. Catherine II, however, gave an undertaking that if the two young Princes of the family, Adam and Constantine, would come to St Petersburg and enter the Russian service as a guarantee of the family’s good behaviour, the Czartoryski estates would not be forfeited. Adam Czartoryski, who had been abroad during the revolt and had not actively assisted Kosciuszko himself, arrived in St Petersburg in the spring of 1795. He was seven years older than Alexander. He had travelled widely in western Europe, spending several months in Paris and Vienna and a whole year in London. His understanding of foreign affairs was remarkable in a man of twenty-five. Already he could look back on Mirabeau ‘in his most brilliant days’ and he was a great admirer of Charles James Fox and the British parliamentary system. It is easy to see what Alexander found attractive. He had never been abroad nor even visited the new Russian territories in the west and the south; and here was a man who knew the salons of Paris and the clubs of London and who had felt for himself the menacing thrill of new ideas in a free society. Alexander envied Czartoryski his wide experience, and sought to harness the Pole’s abilities for his own ends.

  More than half a century later Czartoryski looked back in his Memoirs at these early days of friendship with his future sovereign. It was in the spring of 1796 that Alexander invited Prince Adam to walk with him around the gardens of the Tauride Palace and, in three hours of conversation, explained to him his political hopes and principles. Czartoryski was surprised by the Grand Duke’s liberal sentiments, which he may have taken rather more seriously than was warranted. Alexander declared that he did not approve of the policies of the Government and of the Court, especially towards Poland:

  He added that he detested despotism everywhere, no matter in what way it was exercised; that he loved liberty, to which all men had a right; that he had taken the strongest interest in the French Revolution and, while condemning its terrible excesses, he wished the French Republic success and rejoiced in its establishment … The Grand Duke told me he confided his thoughts to his wife and that she alone knew and approved his sentiments.46

  Not unnaturally, Adam Czartoryski was deeply moved by Alexander’s show of confidence. Privately he rejoiced in the hopes it seemed to hold for Russia, for Europe and, above all, for Poland. Later that year, though still expected to show penitence for his countrymen’s political sins, he was appointed chief aide-de-camp to Alexander. It was a good beginning to a remarkable career.

  Two other men besides Czartoryski influenced Alexander’s development in these last years of Catherine’s reign, Count Victor Kochubey and Colonel Alexei Arakcheev. They differed markedly in background and personality. Kochubey was a nephew of Prince Bezborodko, one of Catherine’s chief ministers, and had spent much of his youth abroad. Before entering the Russian diplomatic service he had already stayed for several years in Sweden and made what was fast becoming the recognized grand tour of the Russian aristocracy, to London, Vienna and revolutionary Paris. Like Czartoryski and his friends, Kochubey accepted many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, acquiring – so a colleague said – ‘a certain European varnish and grand manner which made him a favourite in society’.47 Arakcheev, by contrast, was a professional soldier who came from a small provincial landowner’s family and whose vision never looked beyond the limited horizon of a serf community. As a cadet Arakcheev worked so conscientiously at the school of artillery that he was seconded in 1792 to Paul’s Gatchina Corps (a unit which had little appeal to members of the more aristocratic families). At Gatchina he won rapid promotion, partly because of his efficiency but also because his strict sense of discipline appealed to his master. When in 1795 Alexander and Constantine began to attend their father’s parades and field exercises, Arakcheev was entrusted with the duty of introducing them to military service – or, rather, to Paul’s ideas of what an officer should do. Arakcheev’s close attention to parade punctilio and the details of field exercises saved Alexander from committing unmartial solecisms which would have aroused Paul’s anger.48

  It was a curious basis upon which to build a lasting friendship. But, in this period of his life, Alexander needed Arakcheev more than the young liberal-minded aristocrats. They might widen his perspective, but Arakcheev had a more urgent task: he taught Alexander how to simulate soldierly attributes he did not possess. Ever since childhood Alexander had been deaf in the left ear. Now he was also becoming slightly short-sighted and, although his height gave him a natural dignity and presence, he moved awkwardly because once he had fallen from a horse and injured his hip. These disabilities, slight in any private individual, were a potential source of humiliation in his father’s militaristic society. It says much for Arakcheev’s patient tuition that Alexander was able to conceal from Paul, and from other officers in the Gatchina garrison, the full extent of his afflictions.

  The Succession in Doubt

  Psychologically, however, all this pretence was bad for Alexander. By the summer of 1796 his character was vitiated through and through by a strong element of make-believe. In a sense it had always been there, asserting itself in those childish games which had delighted Catherine and taking command in the difficult moments when he moved between the Courts of his grandmother and his father, letting his individuality lose itself in their shadows. But self-deception at nineteen has more range than in boyhood. Now he spoke the language of the Enlightenment with Czartoryski and his liberal friends, and failed to understand it; he played at officering in an army corps which was itself shadow-acting past campaign
s; and he sought to fulfil a marriage in which love flickered but never flamed. The prospect ahead seemed even more daunting, and he shrank from it. In May 1796 he wrote to Kochubey, who was serving as a diplomat at Constantinople:

  There is incredible confusion in our affairs. In such circumstances, is it possible for one man to rule the State, still less correct abuses within it? This is beyond the strength not only of someone endowed with ordinary abilities like myself, but even of a genius; and I have always held to the rule that it is better not to attempt something than to do it badly. My plan is to settle with my wife on the banks of the Rhine, where I shall live peacefully as a private person finding happiness in the company of friends and in the study of nature.49

  It is hard to say what was in Alexander’s mind. Was he genuinely considering renouncing his rights, or merely indulging in romantic escapism? Probably he was allowing his pen to create yet another dreamworld in which he could project his passing enthusiasms, and his words should not be taken too seriously. But it was not the last time that he was to contemplate, if only momentarily, a flight from reality.