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.’15 Vasilchikov, 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 Potemkin.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’.17 If 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.’18 In 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 1771.20 By 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 Wurttemberg, 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’.22 Panin, 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
By the time their party approached the Russian capital on Saturday 15 June 1773, Grigory Orlov had already been back at Court for almost a month, having resumed all his former offices except that of favourite on 20 May. It was he who rode out with General Bauer to meet the girls on their way from Count Karl Sievers’ estate at Seltsa. Catherine was waiting for them at Gatchina, where they arrived at two o’clock in time for lunch. Paul caught his first sight of his future wife when they set off for Tsarskoye Selo three hours later. He met them halfway, stepping out of his carriage to pay his respects to their mother, Landgravine Caroline. On reaching the palace, where a small crowd had gathered to greet them at the gates, the guests were given an hour to unwind in their apartments before being taken to the Picture Gallery, lined from floor to ceiling with 130 seventeenth-century masterpieces, mostly Flemish and Dutch, as a way of emphasising Russia’s rightful place among the European great powers.24 At her most resplendent in the insignia of the Order of St Andrew, the empress engaged them in conversation until she retired to bed at ten. At the dinner which followed, protocol dictated that the eldest girl, Amalia, and her mother should sit beside Paul while the seventeen-year-old Wilhelmina found herself sandwiched between Panin and Lev Naryshkin, the leading voice in foreign affairs and the wittiest man at Court.25 The same pattern followed next day, as banquet followed upon banquet in an effort to overwhelm the guests with the magnificence of Russian power. Sometimes they dined outside on the balcony, on tables made from the finest mahogany; a band played as they strolled through the garden to the grotto. Catherine was delighted to find that Wilhelmina seemed to confirm all her instincts. In view of her evident desire that her son’s marriage should be happier than her own, it was even more reassuring that Paul instantly liked the girl (by no means a foregone conclusion, particularly for such a temperamental youth) and she accepted him. At lunch on 17 June, they sat next to each other for the first time.26 Within four days of her arrival, the deal was done. Soon the young princess was taking instruction in Orthodoxy from Father Platon, now archbishop of Tver, whose
Still dreaming of a ‘crusade’ to Constantinople, Voltaire would have preferred Wilhelmina to be ‘re-baptised in the church of Saint Sophia, in the presence of the prophet Grimm’.28 Instead, she was converted at the end of the Dormition Fast on 15 August, taking the name Natalia Alekseyevna. The couple were betrothed next day. At the end of the month, in a further demonstration of Orthodox splendour, Catherine was again persuaded to trudge to the Alexander Nevsky monastery on the saint’s feast day, for only the second time since 1762. While Landgravine Caroline looked on from Field Marshal Golitsyn’s house near the Kazan Church, Paul and his fiancee joined the empress in the procession. Wearing the small crown and dressed as a knight of the Order of St Alexander, she emerged from the Winter Palace at ten o’clock to be driven to the church, where Grigory Orlov greeted her at the door, resplendent in his silver guards’ uniform. Platon and the bishop of Mogilev, Georgy (Konissky), led a brief service for the knights, already gathered inside the church. Then, flanked by more than fifty liveried servants, banner-carrying clergy set out on foot to the monastery. The knights followed two-by-two in order of seniority. Behind them came Paul, Natalia and Catherine herself, accompanied by senior courtiers. The Horse Guards brought up the rear. Having twice paused for prayers, first at the Anichkov bridge and then opposite the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem, the empress reached the monastery gates just before midday. Archbishop Gavriil led her past the serried ranks of the Izmailovsky Guards to a service conducted by Innokenty (Nechaev), the bishop of Pskov. Suspending her disbelief during prayers, Catherine kissed the shrine containing the saint’s relics. It was three in the afternoon before she returned to the palace, where the customary banquet and ball continued into
