During the summer of 1772, after Gregory Orlov had been replaced, the relationship between Catherine and her son improved. Living together with Paul at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine made a companion of her son, and the long estrangement seemed to be over. “We have never had a jollier time at Tsarskoe Selo than these nine weeks I have spent there with my son, who is becoming a nice lad. He really appears to enjoy my company,” she wrote to her Hamburg friend Frau Bielcke. “I return to town on Tuesday with my son who does not want to leave my side, and whom I have the honor to please so well that he sometimes changes his place at the table to sit next to me.” Then, after what Paul assumed was Orlov’s final disappearance, Gregory reappeared at court. Paul was dismayed.
In the spring of 1773, the three Hessian princesses and their mother were invited to Russia. They stopped first in Berlin, where, as he had done with Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-one years earlier, Frederick reminded them always to remember they had been born Germans. At the end of June, four Russian naval vessels arrived in Lübeck to carry the Hessian party up the Baltic. The commander of the frigate transporting the young women and their mother was Paul’s best friend, Andrei Razumovsky, the son of Catherine’s friend Kyril Razumovsky. Andrei was captivated by the middle daughter, Wilhelmina, and she by him.
In St. Petersburg, Paul took only two days to make his choice: it was the same as Andrei Razumovsky’s—Princess Wilhelmina. Unfortunately, Wilhelmina’s reaction to the small, strange young man soon to be her husband was not enthusiastic. Catherine noticed her hesitation; so did the girl’s mother. Nevertheless, the machinery of diplomacy and protocol ground ahead. As had been the case with Catherine and her own mother, both the bride-to-be and the landgravine were indifferent to the requirement for a religious conversion. Predictably, as the date of the wedding approached, the landgrave wrote from Germany, objecting to his daughter changing her religion. Also predictably, he surrendered to his wife’s decision. On August 15, 1773, Wilhelmina was received into the Orthodox Church as Natalia Alekseyevna. The next day she was betrothed to Paul and became a Russian grand duchess.
There were banquets, balls, and late-summer picnics at which Catherine enjoyed the company of the landgravine, an energetic woman who was a friend of Goethe’s. Prince Orlov invited the three princesses, their mother, Catherine, and the court to Gatchina, where he gave a lavish reception: five hundred guests dined from Sèvres porcelain and gold plate. Orlov, hoping to irritate the empress, who had brought along her new favorite, Vasilchikov, immediately began to flirt with Louise, the youngest of the visiting princesses. To Berlin, the Prussian minister described “the extraordinary attentions which Prince Orlov pays the landgravine and the freedom of manner with which he treats the princesses, especially the youngest one.”
The wedding of nineteen-year-old Paul and seventeen-year-old Natalia took place on September 29, 1773. It was followed by ten days of court balls, theatrical performances, and masquerades, while people in the streets drank free beer, ate hot meat pies, and watched fireworks soaring above the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. Paul was exultant; a new life and a new freedom seemed to be offering itself. Natalia consoled herself because Andrei Razumovsky was always nearby.
As Paul’s wedding approached, Nikita Panin had been waging a battle to retain his influence over Paul and his wife-to-be. Catherine realized that, once married, Paul would become more independent of her; she was determined that, simultaneously, he also become more independent of Panin. Paul’s marriage would be both the pretext and the moment for severing this tie with Panin. With the loss of his role as tutor, however, Panin would be deprived of the base at court that entitled him to live at the palace and see his charge daily. He would no longer be able to influence Paul’s political views, which, Catherine believed, had helped steer her son toward what she regarded as an excessive admiration of Prussia and Frederick II.
