Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

To take her mind off her troubles, Catherine regaled Voltaire with the success of her new comedies. He would enjoy these works by ‘an anonymous Russian author’, she told him in August, since any weakness in their plots was more than compensated by the liveliness of the characters: ‘some of them are really rather good’. Announcing the forthcoming French translation of O, these times! two months later, she seemed to be on top form: ‘Perhaps you will say after reading it that it is easier to make me laugh than other sovereigns, and you will be right. I am fundamentally an extremely jolly person.’ 13Behind the bravado, however, diplomats in St Petersburg sensed a different mood that autumn. A telltale sign was Catherine’s own admission that she had put off a routine reply to Falconet until ‘the next day and the next day and the day after that’. 14‘Hitherto active and industrious,’ the Prussian ambassador complained at the end of December, ‘she is becoming indolent and slack over business.’ Indeed, though she preferred not to dwell to Voltaire on ‘the great tragedy’ of the Turkish war and the prospect of a more general conflict if Gustav III invaded Norway, Solms thought that these pressures, when combined with the crisis in her love life, had been enough to prompt a spiral of depression that threatened to paralyse her government. ‘The empress increasingly displays the strongest of passions for her new favourite,’ he reported when Orlov finally left for Reval in January 1773. ‘Nevertheless, the departure of the former one made her sad and irritable and for three days she sent back all business.’ 15Vasilchikov, it transpired, was no more than a handsome face, and certainly no substitute for Grigory. ‘I have never cried so much since the day I was born as I have over the last eighteen months,’ she later admitted to Potëmkin. 16

Although Panin undoubtedly benefited from the fall of Orlov and did his best to hasten it once the die was cast, there is no evidence that he was responsible for poisoning Catherine’s mind against Grigory. Still less did he plot to install Paul on the throne. Conscious of Panin’s reputation for sloth, Gunning concluded that the grand duke’s future had been entrusted to him ‘from a conviction that he has neither abilities, resolution nor creativity enough to attempt placing [the crown] on the head of this young Prince, even if the latter had spirit enough to wear it, which is as yet very problematical’. 17If that was an underestimate of Panin’s intellect, it was a shrewd assessment of the ambitions of both tutor and pupil. Paul himself posed no threat to his mother. Despite his simmering resentment of her treatment of Peter III, she received the same unquestioning loyalty from her heir as he later expected from his subjects. Indeed, at this point they seemed to be united by more than mere duty. Following his recovery from illness in 1771, relations between mother and son sharply improved after a decade in which her lack of affection attracted regular comment from foreign diplomats. Though some saw nothing more in this reconciliation than an arrangement of convenience between two inveterate dissemblers, it was impossible to ignore their newfound fondness for each other’s company. ‘I will be returning to town on Tuesday,’ Catherine told Frau Bielke at the end of August 1772, ‘with my son who no longer wants to be a step away from me and whom I have the honour of amusing so well that he sometimes changes his place at table in order to sit beside me.’ 18In the excitement over the negotiations with Orlov, Paul’s eighteenth birthday passed without incident. In a private ceremony, attended only by Panin and his Holsteiner associate, Caspar von Saldern, the empress exhorted him on the need to govern justly and with moderation. Though the foreign ministers were entertained at Court to celebrate his Holstein inheritance, no promotions were announced. With luck, his Russian coming-of-age in the following year could be similarly overshadowed by his marriage. 19

Had either Panin or the grand duke harboured any design of pressing Paul’s claim to the throne, they would surely have exploited the opportunity offered by unscrupulous Saldern in the months before the wedding. Though the circumstances remain mysterious, it was apparently the Holsteiner who persuaded Paul that Panin could no longer be relied upon to serve his interests. Cathcart had characterised Saldern in 1769 as ‘a man of consummate knowledge in business, great perspicacity, strong expression, and very much the friend or enemy of every system he adopts or opposes and in the same degree of the persons who espouse them’. At that time, he seemed ‘a great assertor of the northern system’, and it was in that capacity that he was appointed to lead Russia’s negotiations in Warsaw in 1771. 20By the time he returned, embittered by Panin’s criticism of his peremptory treatment of the Poles, his loyalties had been reversed. Sometime in late 1772 or early 1773, Saldern talked the grand duke into authorising him to act as his representative in his dealings with the Young Court. Armed with a signed agreement to this effect, he approached Panin with a plan to increase Paul’s role in government, allegedly to the point of creating a co-regency on the model of Joseph II and Maria Theresa. Perhaps he was trying on behalf of the Orlovs to discredit his former patron; just as probably, he had mercenary self-interest at heart. Whatever his motives, this time he had overreached himself. Panin destroyed the incriminating paper. While Paul, for the moment, kept silent, Saldern was packed off to Copenhagen, his reputation temporarily intact. Now all eyes turned to the wedding, for which plans were already complete by January 1773. 21

The search for a bride had been entrusted to Baron von Assebourg, the former Danish minister to the empress’s Court, as long ago as 1768. By Easter 1771 he had submitted the results of his preliminary researches, which Catherine considered at Tsarskoye Selo not long before Paul fell ill. Just as Elizabeth had done before her, the empress sought a pliable candidate, no older than the grand duke, from the Protestant ‘third Germany’ (the Princess of Nassau was explicitly ruled out on grounds of her Catholicism). Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha had been an early front-runner, not least because her paternal grandmother was first cousin to the late Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst. On investigation, however, the girl turned out to be too plump and her mother too squeamish about her conversion to Orthodoxy. ‘Think no further of the princess of Saxe-Gotha,’ Catherine ordered Assebourg: ‘She is exactly what it takes to displease us.’ Though the empress found it hard to believe that Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt could be quite so attractive as Assebourg claimed, she seemed worthy of further consideration despite doubts about her temperament and the expense involved in settling an establishment on her siblings. Even so, Catherine still favoured Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, whose father had been assiduous in his attentions and ‘who will be at the end of her twelfth year next October. Her doctor’s reflections on her robust health draw me to her’. 22Panin, however, had already determined that Sophia Dorothea was too young (thirteen was then the age of consent for females in the Orthodox Church) and since his view prevailed, it was Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt and her sisters, Amalia and Louisa, who eventually travelled to Russia via Berlin, just as Catherine had done almost thirty years earlier, in the company of their mother and with the assistance of Frederick the Great. ‘I have intrigued like the very devil to lead things to this point,’ the king told Prince Henry, predicting that the alliance would be ‘of the greatest possible utility to posterity’. 23