When Alexander was seven and Constantine almost six, and they had reached the age for tutors, Catherine wrote thirty pages of instructions to guide their education. They were to be truthful and courageous. They were to be courteous to servants as well as to elders. They must go to bed early in rooms with plenty of fresh air circulating at a temperature of sixty degrees Farenheit. They were to sleep on flat beds with leather mattresses. They were to wash every day in cold water, and, in winter, to go to Russian steam baths. In summer, they were to learn to swim. Food was to be plain; fruit of all kinds was to serve as breakfast in summer. They were to plant their own gardens and grow their own vegetables. Any necessary punishment would consist of teaching the child to be ashamed of his misbehavior. Rebukes were to be delivered in private; praise in public. Corporal punishment was forbidden.
In 1784, Catherine appointed a Swiss, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, to be the boys’ primary tutor. A republican, skeptical of autocracy, he won Alexander’s respect and affection and, with Catherine’s permission, continued to preach the blessings of liberty and the duties of a sovereign toward his people. Alexander listened to these teachings; Constantine rebelled against them. Once he shouted at La Harpe that when he came to power, he would enter Switzerland with his army and destroy the country. La Harpe replied calmly, “There is in my country, near the little town of Morat, a building in which we keep the bones of those who pay us such a visit.”
From Alexander’s earliest years, Catherine nourished a hope that she could put him in place of her son, Paul, as her successor. Just as it had not taken Paul long to suspect that his mother’s intention to disinherit him was behind her possessive behavior regarding his son, Alexander, as he grew older, realized that he was the object of a struggle between his parents and his grandmother. He learned to adapt himself to the company he was in. At Gatchina, he listened to his father’s diatribes against the empress; back at court, he concurred with whatever his grandmother said. Unable to choose, he retreated into irresolution and equivocation; throughout his life, Alexander had difficulty making straightforward, unambiguous decisions.
Paul and Maria’s ten children were produced over a period of nineteen years. There were four boys and six girls. Their third son, Nicholas, arrived in 1796, the last year of Catherine’s life, and he escaped her strict supervision. The girls, unlike their older brothers, were left with their parents, who were allowed to educate them however they wished. Alexander remained Catherine’s primary concern, and her anxiety about the succession and the future of the dynasty led her to push him to marry early. Although his tutors believed that he was too immature for marriage, Catherine, in October 1792, invited two German princesses from Baden to visit St. Petersburg for scrutiny. The elder sister, Louisa, was fourteen; Fredericka was a year younger. Louisa was shy but quickly fell in love with the Russian prince. Alexander admitted that he liked her. This was sufficient for Catherine. In January 1793, Louisa converted to Orthodoxy and became the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alekseyevna. The wedding of Alexander when he was still fifteen and the newly named Elizabeth was fourteen took place in September 1793. Unfortunately for Catherine’s dynastic hopes, Elizabeth never gave birth to a living child. Constantine, who refused the throne at the end of Alexander’s reign in 1825, remained without legitimate children. That left Nicholas, the grandson Catherine had left to his mother to educate, to inherit the throne and, through his descendants, to carry on the dynasty.
Catherine permitted Paul and Maria to keep their daughters at home, but when she believed that the young women were ready to marry she took charge. The eldest of her granddaughters, Alexandra Pavlovna, was thirteen years old when the empress decided the time had come. Catherine wanted a marriage to Gustavus Adolphus, the young uncrowned king of Sweden, the son of Gustavus III, who had been assassinated four years earlier. A marriage to young Gustavus would ameliorate the long-standing hostility between Russia and Sweden and secure the Russian position on the upper Baltic.
There was an obstacle. In November 1795, Gustavus’s engagement to Princess Louisa, the Protestant daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, had been announced. Catherine was not deterred. Word was passed to the Swedish regent, the Duke of Sudermania, brother of the murdered Gustavus III and uncle of the young uncrowned king, that hundreds of thousands of rubles would be available to subsidize the Swedish treasury once the empress’s wish was granted. At the beginning of April 1796, the regent agreed to postpone his nephew’s marriage until the young man reached his majority at eighteen in November of that year.
