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THREE YEARS BEFORE, Princess Sophia of Württemburg had been Catherine’s first choice as a bride for Paul, but Sophia had been ruled out because she was only fourteen. Now, Sophia, almost seventeen, was in every respect exactly what Catherine sought: a German princess whose family was aristocratic but of modest circumstances, prolific with nine children, the three sons tall and strong, the six daughters handsome and wide-hipped. The presence of Prince Henry of Prussia in St. Petersburg made Catherine’s new project easier to achieve. Sophia of Württemburg was a great-niece of Frederick II and Prince Henry, and, as Paul idealized Prussia and the Prussian monarch, Catherine hoped that Prince Henry could help persuade her distraught son to marry a relative of his hero. Henry, knowing that his brother was always eager to strengthen ties with Russia, sent a message to Frederick by the fastest courier.
Frederick did everything he could to satisfy and please Catherine. He urged Sophia and her parents to accept the marriage, stressing its political advantages for Prussia and potential financial benefits for the house of Württemburg. He pointed out that Catherine had pledged a dowry for all three Württemburg daughters. An obstacle had to be overcome: Sophia was already engaged to Lewis (Ludwig), prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who happened to be the brother of the recently deceased Natalia and therefore Paul’s former brother-in-law. On the king’s orders, the Hesse engagement was broken off, and, with the promise of a pension from Catherine and the hand of another Württemburg daughter, Prince Lewis was appeased.
The next step was to arrange a meeting of the prospective bride and groom. Frederick summoned Sophia to Berlin, where Paul would travel to meet her. This plan suited everyone. Foreign travel was what Paul needed as a distraction from thoughts of Natalia’s death and the stinging humiliation of her betrayal. Further, the prospect of a trip to Berlin appeared certain to delight the young widower, who had never been abroad. The opportunity to meet Frederick II provided another powerful incentive.
The journey to Berlin began on June 13, 1776, with Paul sitting in a large, comfortable carriage and Prince Henry at his side. During Paul’s absence, Catherine wrote frequently, praising his letters and worrying about his health. With her encouragement, Paul inspected local Russian government offices, military garrisons, and commercial enterprises along the road to the frontier. She responded to Paul’s praise of the orderliness and manners of Livonia by saying, “I hope that in time the main part of Russia will not yield to … [Livonia] in anything, neither in order nor in the correction of manners, and that your lifetime will be sufficient to see such a change.” While Paul was traveling, Frederick was briefing Sophia of Württemburg about the Russian court, just as he had briefed Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-two years before. As he had done with the earlier Sophia, he emphasized that conversion from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy was of little consequence, especially when high matters of state were involved.
When Paul reached Berlin, Frederick made every effort to impress and honor the twenty-three-year-old grand duke. Paul was saluted by cannon, rode beneath triumphal arches, and passed between double lines of soldiers. He attended receptions, dinners, and balls. Few were more practiced and effective in the art of political flattery than the king. Paul, accustomed to playing an insignificant role at his mother’s court, now found himself honored and celebrated by the great Frederick. For the first time in his life, he received the consideration due to the heir to a great throne. “Nothing can exceed the attention His Prussian Majesty pays to the grand duke, nor the pains he takes to captivate and please him,” reported the British ambassador from Berlin. Paul reveled in this attention, which cemented his view that the king of Prussia was the greatest man and greatest monarch in Europe. He wrote to his mother that the level of civilization in Prussia was two centuries ahead of that in Russia.
Not only did Paul’s reception in Berlin thoroughly reconcile him to the idea of a second marriage, but he also developed an immediate liking for Sophia. She was tall, blond, wholesome, amiable, and sentimental. And, because she had been recommended by Frederick, she seemed to Paul twice as desirable. As for Sophia, she made no protest when her engagement to the handsome Lewis of Hesse was suddenly broken off and her great uncles Frederick and Henry introduced the small, less attractive Paul. Whatever her innermost feelings when she first saw Paul, she dutifully accepted him. “The grand duke is exceedingly amiable,” she wrote to her mother. “He has every charm.”
Catherine was pleased by what Paul wrote in his letters about Sophia’s appearance and good sense, her determination to be a good wife, and her resolve to learn Russian. The empress sent her blessing, but, in order to make certain that she would keep absolute control, she insisted that Sophia leave her mother behind in Berlin and come to Russia alone. She wrote to the princess, praising her willingness to make herself “my daughter.… Be assured that I shall not neglect a single occasion where I may prove to Your Highness the sentiments of a tender mother.” She also stressed that she wanted the marriage to take place as soon as possible. She wrote to Grimm:
We shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take about fifteen days, I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better.… To accelerate that … [a cabinet secretary] has gone to Memel to teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will follow afterwards. Eight days from this, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will have to hurry.
Meanwhile, the empress sent a diamond necklace and earrings to the bride-to-be, and a jewel-encrusted snuffbox and a sword to her parents. On August 24, Sophia crossed the Russian frontier at Riga, and on August 31, she and Paul were received by Catherine at Tsarskoe Selo. The empress greeted Sophia warmly, and, a few days later, she wrote to Madame Bielcke:
My son has returned very much taken with his princess. I confess to you that I am enchanted with her. She is precisely that which is desired; shapely as a nymph, a complexion the color of the lily and the rose, the most beautiful skin in the world, tall, but still graceful; modesty, sweetness, kindness, and innocence are reflected in her face.… The whole world is enchanted with her … she does everything to please.… In a word, my princess is everything that I desired. So there, I am content.
On September 6, Catherine, Paul, and Sophia traveled from Tsarskoe Selo to St. Petersburg. A Lutheran pastor and an obliging Orthodox priest confirmed Frederick of Prussia’s opinion that the differences between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy were minimal. On September 14, Sophia Dorothea’s official conversion took place; she accepted Orthodoxy and became Maria Fyodorovna. Her formal betrothal followed the next day, on which occasion she wrote to Paul, “I swear to love and adore you all my life and to be always attached to you, and nothing in the world will make me change with respect to you. Those are the sentiments of your ever affectionate and faithful betrothed.”
On September 26, 1776, only five months after Natalia died, Paul and Maria were married and the new grand duchess set about her duty. Fourteen and a half months later, on December 12, 1777, after only a few hours of labor and without complications, Maria gave birth to a healthy boy, Catherine’s first grandchild, a future emperor. Catherine, ecstatic, named him Alexander. A second child arrived eighteen months later, another healthy boy, insurance for the dynasty. Again, Catherine rejoiced. She named him Constantine.
Paul’s second marriage probably gave him the greatest happiness of his life. “This dear husband is an angel, the pearl of husbands. I am madly in love with him and I am perfectly happy,” Maria wrote to a friend in Germany. She was an excellent wife for Paul. She did her best to make him happy and to calm his anxieties, becoming not only his wife but his friend. She encouraged Paul’s best qualities at home and treated him with respect and deference in public. Paul was grateful and wrote to Henry of Prussia, “Wherever she goes, she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease. And she has the art of not only driving out all my melancholy thoughts, but even of giving me back the good humor that I had completely lost during these last three unhappy years.” Together, Paul and Maria produced nine healthy children.
• • •
In 1781, Catherine, hoping to convince her Prussophile son of the advantages of her new friendship with Joseph II of Austria, arranged for Paul and Maria to make a European tour. It would take them a year and carry them to Vienna, Italy, her home in Württemburg, and Paris, but would pointedly exclude Berlin. Maria Fyodorovna was eager to see her family, but her pleasure faded when she was told that her children would remain behind. Paul’s disappointment was political; his mother’s refusal to let him revisit Berlin meant that he could not renew his acquaintance with Frederick. Tension between mother and son was heightened by the almost simultaneous dismissal of Nikita Panin from leadership of the College of Foreign Affairs. In fact, Panin’s removal and Catherine’s refusal to let Paul visit Berlin were linked. The close relationship between Russia and Prussia, which had been the centerpiece of Panin’s foreign policy, was crumbling even as Catherine’s friendship with Joseph II of Austria was growing stronger. Joseph had visited Catherine and St. Petersburg the year before, and the empress was hoping to embrace Austria as a partner and ally against the Turks.
On October 1, 1781, the journey began with the couple traveling incognito as the Comte et Countess du Nord—the Count and Countess of the North. Maria, upset to be leaving her children, fainted three times before the carriage could get under way. Once on the road, however, she recovered and the tour was a triumph. Catherine had been generous, supplying three hundred thousand rubles for travel expenses. She wrote affectionate letters to “my dearest children,” telling them to come straight home if they became homesick and that three-year-old Alexander “had been given a map of Europe so that he could follow his parents’ itinerary.”
Their first stop was in Poland, where Stanislaus charmed Maria Fyodorovna. Catherine, curious about her former lover, asked Paul “whether his Polish majesty was still such a delightful conversationalist or whether the cares of royalty had destroyed these qualities.” She added, “My old friend must have had difficulty in tracing any resemblance between my contemporary portraits and the face he remembers from the past.”
The warm reception in Poland was a taste of what was to come. Joseph II traveled to the Austrian frontier to welcome the heir to the Russian throne. Vienna celebrated the couple’s presence, and Maria reveled in the elegance of the Austrian court and aristocracy. A visit scheduled to last a fortnight was extended to a month, during which Paul moderated his pro-Prussian sentiments and gravitated toward Joseph II. When his guests were leaving for the south, Joseph instructed his relatives in Tuscany and Naples that the grand duchess “prefers stewed fruit to rich deserts and neither she nor her husband touches wine. She has a fondness for mineral water.”
The Hapsburg princes in Italy continued the warm welcome, but the culmination of their long journey was Paris. Crowds cheered the young couple wherever they appeared: at the theater, the racetrack, or walking in the Tuileries Gardens. At Versailles, Marie Antoinette, Joseph II’s sister, concentrated on pleasing Paul and reported, “The grand duke has the air of an ardent and impetuous man who holds himself in.” The queen treated the grand duchess as an old and dear friend. Presented with a rare porcelain dinner set produced at Sèvres, Maria thought it was intended for the empress, her mother-in-law, until, with astonishment, she saw the arms of Russia and Württemburg intertwined on the plates.
Their return to Russia was painfully anticlimactic. The Count and Countess of the North had been absent for fourteen months; on first meeting their sons, the boys looked at them as strangers and clung to their grandmother’s skirts. The empress appeared determined to deflate the couple’s sense of accomplishment. The welcome Paul had received everywhere had enhanced his sense of self-worth; now Catherine told him that his travels had spoiled him. The young grand duchess was met with a more specific rebuff. She had gone to Marie Antoinette’s milliner, the famous Mlle Bertin, and made a number of purchases. The trunks from Paris were still being unpacked in St. Petersburg when Catherine forbade the wearing at court of tall headdresses with feathers, exactly the fashion which Maria had brought home to emulate the queen of France. Paul’s wife was commanded to return the purchases, having been told that a tall woman looked better in simple Russian costume than in these gaudy Parisian trappings. Paul, meanwhile, found that Nikita Panin’s health had collapsed. In 1783, the grand duke and his wife were at the deathbed of the man who had been Paul’s teacher, adviser, protector, and friend for twenty-three years.
• • •
Paul was fortunate in his second marriage, but in most other areas of life, he suffered constant frustration. At different times he exhibited two distinctly different personalities, and people meeting him often took away entirely opposite views of the heir to the throne. In 1780, Emperor Joseph II of Austria paid his first visit to Russia, and he reported his impressions to his mother, Maria Theresa. Like everyone, he admired Maria Fyodorovna. More surprisingly, his verdict on Paul was largely favorable:
The grand duke is greatly undervalued abroad. His wife is very beautiful and seems created for her position. They understand each other perfectly. They are clever and vivacious and very well educated, as well as high-principled, open, and just. The happiness of others is more to them than wealth. With the empress, they are ill at ease, especially the grand duke. There is a lack of intimacy [between Paul and his mother] without … which I could not live. The grand duchess is more natural. She has great influence over her husband, loves him, and rules him. She will certainly play an important part some day.… The grand duke has many qualities deserving respect, but it is extremely difficult to play second fiddle here when Catherine II plays the first. The more I learn of the grand duchess, the greater is my admiration. She is exceptional in mind and heart, attractive in appearance and blameless in conduct. If I could have met a princess like her ten years ago, I should have been most happy to marry her.
The French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1784, also had a generally positive opinion of Paul, although it was tinged with qualifications:
When they admitted me into their society, I learned to know all the rare qualities which at this period won general affection.… Their circle, though fairly large, seemed, especially in the country, more like a friendly gathering than a stiff court. No private family did the honors of the house with more ease and grace … everything bore the imprint of the best tone and the most delicate taste. The grand duchess, majestic, affable and natural, pretty without coquetry, amiable without affectation, created an impression of virtue without pose. Paul sought to please and was well-informed. One was struck by his great vivacity and nobility of character. These, however, were only first impressions. Soon, one noticed, above all when he spoke of his personal position and future, a disquiet, a mistrust, an extreme susceptibility; in fact, oddities which were to cause his faults, his injustices and his misfortunes. In any other rank of life he might have made himself and others happy; but for such a man the throne, above all the Russian throne, could not fail to be dangerous.
Years later, after his return to France and after Paul’s reign had ended in assassination, Ségur had more to say about the emperor. It was less favorable:
He combined plenty of intelligence and information with the most unquiet and mistrustful humor and the most unsteady character. Though often affable to the point of familiarity, he was more frequently haughty, despotic, and harsh. Never had one seen a man more frightened, more capricious, less capable of rendering himself or others happy. It was not malignity … it was a sickness of mind. He tormented all who approached him because he unceasingly tormented himself.… Fear upset his judgement. Imagined perils gave rise to real ones.
After the death of Gregory Orlov in 1783, Catherine purchased the palace at Gatchina, thirty miles south of the capital, which she had given her favorite; now she presented it to Paul. Living there with his family, he complained bitterly about his exclusion from power and responsibility. “You tax me with my hypochondria and black moods,” he wrote to Prince Henry. “It may be so. But the inaction to which I am condemned makes the part excusable.” On another occasion, he wrote to Prince Henry, “Permit me to write you often; my heart has need to unburden itself, especially in the sad life that I lead.” The letter stopped abruptly: “My tears prevent me from continuing.”
At Gatchina, Paul was free to indulge his version of Peter III’s mania for soldiering. To console himself for the humiliation of being barred from a regular army command, he engaged a Prussian drillmaster and proceeded to create his own small, private army. By 1788, he had five companies of men dressed in tightly buttoned Prussian uniforms and powdered wigs. Every day, Paul appeared, wearing high boots and elbow-length gloves, and drilled his men to exhaustion—just as Peter III had done. He was short-tempered and, when displeased, would lash out with his cane. Count Fyodor Rostopchin wrote to a friend:
One cannot see everything the grand duke does without being moved to pity and horror. One would think he was trying to invent ways to make himself hated and detested. He has gotten it into his head that people despise him and want to show their disrespect; starting from that conception, he seizes on anything and punishes indiscriminately. The least delay, the least contradiction … and he flies into a rage.
A humiliation Paul could never overcome and which kept him away from court was the presence of his mother’s favorites; they automatically became his enemies. As a child, he had hated Orlov. Then Orlov was replaced by Vasilchikov and other nobodies like Zorich, Yermolov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Zubov. The vast sums continually bestowed on these young men emphasized to Paul, himself always in debt, the difference between the way she treated them and him. Potemkin, upon becoming all-powerful, stopped bothering even to be polite to the grand duke and openly dismissed him as a fool.
When she seized the throne, Catherine had proclaimed Paul to be her heir. Conceivably, when he reached his majority, she might also have enthroned him as co-ruler with significant responsibilities, as Maria Theresa had done with her son Joseph. In Vienna, Paul had seen the results of this other mother giving her son opportunities to learn by assisting her in ruling. There was never a chance that Catherine would do this. She saw her son as a rival, not a helpmate, and she gave Paul no role in the government of Russia. He and his wife were required to appear at official ceremonies; otherwise, mother and son saw little of each other.
To keep Paul in his place as a political cipher, Catherine found constant fault with him; at times he was too childish; at others too independent. One minute, she would accuse him of paying insufficient attention to serious matters; the next, she complained that he was interfering in matters beyond his competence. Unable to decide how or where to use him, she gave up and decided not to use him at all. When he asked to become a member of the Imperial Council, he was rejected. “I told you that your request needs mature consideration,” his mother said. “I do not think your entrance into the Council would be desirable. You must be patient until I change my mind.” On the outbreak of her second war with Turkey in 1787, Paul, who was thirty-three, asked to join the army as a volunteer. At first, she refused permission; then she gave in, but she reversed course again when Maria became pregnant. Her reasoning, she told Paul, was that if he deserted his wife at the moment of childbirth, his absence might jeopardize a precious Romanov life. He bitterly resented this veto on military service. When war suddenly broke out with Sweden a year later, Catherine relented sufficiently to allow Paul to visit the army in Finland. His passion for this duty was reflected in the degree to which his wife worried about his safety; she believed that he was actually going to fight. “I shall be separated from my beloved husband,” Maria wrote. “My heart is almost broken by anxiety for the life of him for whom I would willingly sacrifice my own.” Paul put on his uniform and left St. Petersburg on July 1, 1788, but his service was brief. He criticized the hastily assembled Russian soldiers in Finland because they did not live up to the parade ground standards of Gatchina; he quarreled with the Russian commander in chief; he was not allowed to see maps or discuss military operations. By mid-September he was back in the capital; he never went to war again.
During the childhood of Paul and Maria’s first son, Alexander, Catherine began to think seriously about disinheriting Paul and passing the succession directly to her grandson. There was no constitutional barrier to this: the law of succession decreed by Peter the Great empowered every reigning Russian sovereign to overrule the tradition of primogeniture and name his or her successor, male or female. Catherine could make that decision right up to the moment of death. That the empress was thinking of naming her gifted and handsome grandson to succeed her was widely suspected, especially by Paul. He had another reason to hate his mother: not only had she stood between him and any training for the throne; now she was confronting him with his own son—precocious, attractive, and beloved by the empress—as a rival for the prize for which he had been waiting most of his life.
As years of frustration warped Paul’s character, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Already, he was melancholy and pessimistic; now he began to appear unbalanced. His behavior sometimes worried even his loyal wife. “There is no one who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties,” Maria said. Ironically, Paul’s shaky reputation and strange behavior reinforced Catherine’s hold on the throne; everyone desired the reins of government to remain in her strong hands as long as possible. When she felt her own strength declining, and she worried about the future of Russia, she never spoke of the reign of her son. It was Alexander of whom she spoke as her heir. Otherwise, she said gloomily, “I see into what hands the empire will fall when I am gone.” In a letter to Grimm in 1791, referring to the bloody turmoil of the French Revolution, she predicted the coming of a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane to Europe. “This will not come in my time,” she said, “and I hope not in the time of M. Alexander.” In the last months of her life, she may have thought of changing the succession. Thirty years later, Maria, as Paul’s widow, confided to her daughter Anna that a few weeks before Catherine’s death, the empress had invited her to sign a paper demanding that Paul renounce his right to the throne. Maria had indignantly refused. A subsequent appeal by Catherine to Alexander to save his country from rule by his father was equally fruitless.
Paul, enduring this long nightmare, had no idea how it would end. For years, he had been aware that disinheritance was in his mother’s mind. In 1788, as he was leaving for the army in Finland, he dictated a will instructing his wife to find and secure the empress’s papers at once in the event of her death; he wanted to make sure that no last testament would affect his claim to the throne. Until her final hours, many people at court believed that Catherine intended to disinherit Paul. A manifesto announcing this decision and proclaiming her grandson as her successor was expected on January 1, 1797. Whether she left such a will that was then destroyed by Paul, no one knows. More likely, she was still undecided when she died.
The schism between mother and son stretched beyond the grave. When finally, in 1796, he reached the throne, Paul immediately restored primogeniture as the basis of succession to the crown. Thereafter, until the fall of the monarchy and the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the eldest son of the deceased sovereign—or, lacking a son, the eldest male closest in the direct family line—would succeed. Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through. And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman.