Noble Blood - In the Shadow of the Great

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Catherine the Great's son, Paul I, idolized his deceased father Peter III and resented his powerful mother. Unfortunately for him, when he finally became Tsar, he would learn that wielding power isn't as easy as it looks. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? In 1998, my life was forever changed when I took on the role of Charlotte York on a new show called Sex and the City. Now I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and relive all of the incredible moments this show brought us on and off the screen. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. One quick note before we begin. If you're enjoying Noble Blood, we have a Patreon. Patreon.com slash Noble Blood Tales. You can support the show and get access to bibliographies, episode scripts, and a variety of random bonus content. But of course, the best support is just listening to the show, which is and will always be completely free. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Miles. from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion is advised. On July 8th, 1762, the woman who would go on to be known as Catherine the Great got word that the moment had come for the coup she had been planning with her closest advisors and generals. The next morning, while her husband, the ineffectual Emperor Peter III,

lingered with a mistress at a palace outside of the city. Catherine rode in military uniform through the barracks, solidifying her support and her loyalty amongst the troops of Russia. Her husband had been the Tsar for fewer than six months when he was captured by guardsmen loyal to Catherine and forced to abdicate. Just eight days after that, the imprisoned Peter died, likely of strangulation, although the official autopsy would declare it to be apople. sexy. Such began in earnest the long and illustrious reign of Catherine the Great, the minor princess turned consort turned empress, who ushered in a new era of enlightenment philosophy in an attempt to bring westernized political theory to the country. The coup itself, its machinations and the many places it almost went wrong, is fascinating. And I urge you, if you haven't already,

to listen to the episode that we did about it on this very podcast. Because today we are not talking about Catherine the Great. We're discussing instead her son, Paul I. Imagine the scene during the coup, Catherine and her lover riding gallantly on magnificent stallions through the city to where Catherine would take her oath of office. Now turn the camera a little to the side, to a distant palace window,

where a small, not terribly attractive child of seven years old, might have been looking out. Little Paul I saw his ambitious mother seize power from his father. If she wasn't responsible for his father's death directly, then at least indirectly. The boy ultimately grew up into a resentful, bitter man with both enemies and allies who would politely question his sanity. He's an Oedipold case that Freud himself would have seen. salivated over. Paul I I might have been a smart man, but he was a man who let his

insecurities and idiosyncrasies control him, to the point where his own nobles turned against him. Being an emperor is a precarious position at the best of times. Unfortunately for Paul I, his mother made politics look easy. For Paul, the crown would cost him his life. I'm Dana Schwartz. and this is noble blood. One quick historical quirk that we're going to have to talk about before we start,

the changing of the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian. Pope Gregory the 13th sanctioned a small change to the calendar to prevent drift. The actual solar year is slightly shorter than having one leap day every four years accounts for. And so under the Julian calendar, we were getting an extra day every 128 years. The Gregorian calendar fixed that and basically fast-forwarded a few days to catch up to where the sun was, the days that we had lost during the Julian calendar. But the tricky thing is that different countries adopted the Gregorian calendar at different times. Catholic countries like France took to it almost right away,

right when Pope Gregory the 13th did in the 16th century. But England, for example, didn't adopt it until 1752. the year when September 2nd was followed by September 14th. Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until the 20th century, which means that some of the dates in this story occurred 11 days earlier in Russia than people would have recorded them as happening in Europe. For example, Catherine the Great would say that she led her coup in St. Petersburg on June 28th, while someone in France would think that it happened on July 9th.

Some historians deal with this discrepancy by marking certain dates as OS or NS for old style or new style. So back in OS Russia, Paul I would say that his birthday was September 20th, 1754. He was the first child born to Peter and Catherine, back when they were just the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia. The future Catherine the Great was far too ambitious on her own behalf to concern her. herself too much with an hair. Thanks to her husband's impotence and their general distaste for each other, it had taken the two of them a decade to conceive. The rumors, fanned by Catherine herself, said that the child was actually her lover, Sergei Salticoves. Later in life, Catherine would say that those rumors were just to make her husband jealous, that of course they were his children.

But there are strong arguments to be made on either side. On one, one hand, Peter did struggle with impotence, and he never impregnated any of his mistresses. And it would be in Catherine's best interest to lie later on after the coup, to link her child back to the Romanov dynasty, because she wasn't a Russian royal by blood. On the other hand, Paul does bear resemblance to Peter III, and Peter never disavowed the child or denounced Catherine as an adulteress. He disliked his wife so much that one imagines given her precarious situation at court back when she was just a grand duchess, that if she did bear a son by someone else,

Peter could have used that to get rid of her. Assuming Paul was Peter's son, the circumstances of his birth would be just as cold and loveless as those of his conception. The Empress Elizabeth, Peter's aunt, was eager for Catherine and Peter to have a male heir, an air that she could mold to her satisfaction. Catherine was made to give birth in a room right next to the Empress's chambers. Just moments after the umbilical cord was cut, baby Paul was swept into a blanket and out of the room to be presented to the Empress.

The new mother, Catherine, was all but forgotten in the room where she had just given birth. For hours, no one cleaned the room or gave Catherine any warmth or comfort or food. It seemed to her that they had just forgotten that she was there. She bled and sweat and shivered against the chill of an open window, all alone and too weak to call for help, and too weak to get up to go to her own comfortable bedchambers. Catherine never held her infant to her own breast. Eager as Empress Elizabeth was for a baby to care for in theory,

in practice she was wide. wildly neglectful. On the rare occasions that she did give baby Paul attention, she doaded on him, but then she quickly lost interest. Paul was brought up by tutors and a governor. His diet was nutritionally deficient, and he was lonely, with very little interaction from either parent. And then, when he was seven years old, Emperor's Elizabeth died. Six months later, Paul's father, the emperor, was overthrown by his mother, and his father was killed. Catherine was the empress then, but it turns out she had about as much interest in the stranger that they said was her son as his late great-aunt during her neglectful periods.

Catherine and Paul never bonded and never would bond. She resented him for being sickly and a not very attractive child, and for being an implicit threat to her power because he, he was a Romanov by blood. He resented her because, well, he blamed the death of his father on her. Neither trusted the other, probably for good reason, and Catherine had no interest in training him to be her heir, lest he tried to force her to share some of her power. The best thing to do with her son, then, was just marry him off. When Paul was 19, Catherine chose a princess for him. Will Halmina, from one of the many non-united German kingdoms.

Just three years into that marriage, the woman died in childbirth, which, at least in Paul's mind, was probably for the best. Will Helmina had already taken a lover in their brief marriage, and given her strong-willed ways and open ambition, she had reminded Paul of his mother. Now a young single man in his early 20s, Paul started openly talking about co-ruling with Catherine.

that wouldn't do for Catherine. And so just six months after he became a widower, Catherine married her son to another Germanic princess, a woman named Sophia Dorothea, which would become rationized to Maria Fedorovna. This marriage proved to be a little longer lasting. The pair had a son within a year, a little cherubic thing they named Alexander.

Just as it had been done to her newborn infant, Catherine swept the baby away immediately after he was born to raise him herself as her heir. To keep her son occupied and placid, Catherine granted Paul a nice estate out in the suburbs, Garchina, where Paul kept a brigade of soldiers. Over the years, the little that Paul knew about his own father became embellished in his mind. Like his father, Paul became fascinated by the Prussian model. of military dress and discipline. And so, like his father, he forced his soldiers to drill and parade around for his amusement. Paul and his wife had what was by 18th century standards a successful marriage.

Even though Paul had two mistresses, over 22 years he and his wife would go on to have 10 children. One of those children, of course, was Alexander, the firstborn son that Catherine had been grooming for the throne since his infancy. In 1787, rumors began to spread that Catherine was going to name Alexander, not Paul, her heir, skipping over Paul completely. Word is that Catherine even met secretly with Alexander's tutors and with Alexander's mother, Maria. But ultimately, those plans would never come to fruition. In 1796, when Catherine died of a stroke, Paul instantly sprung into action to seize power. He destroyed Catherine's will, which was probably unnecessary given that there was no indication that his son Alexander would have been willing to honor

her wishes over his own fathers. Now, at 42 years old, Paul was finally in charge, and the first thing he did was repeal the practice of rulers being allowed to choose their successors willy-nilly. Instead, he declared that it should always be the oldest, most eligible son who was next in line for the throne, and that women would only inherit the throne if there were no legitimately born male heirs in the family. The years of repressed bitterness towards his mother emerged in policy, all meant to undo everything that Catherine had done, and to defend the memory of his long-dead father. Paul had the bones of Gregory Potemkin, Catherine's lover, dug up and scattered.

He immediately recalled all troops located outside Russia, because unlike his mother, Paul had no expansionist ideals. Paul was incredibly vindictive, willing to hurt himself and hurt Russia, just despite his dead mother. Catherine had loved French culture and philosophy. She regularly read French philosophers and famously corresponded with Voltaire. Paul saw French culture as a threat. After the French Revolution, Paul did everything in his power to prevent that ideology from reaching Russia.

He banned foreign books, banned foreign newspapers, and forbid anyone in court from wearing French fashions. Some of that seems logical. you're an absolutist ruler, you don't want your people to get any bright, revolutionary ideas. But Paul wasn't a rational ruler. He was prone to fits a violent rage that terrified his friends and servants. Sometimes he made decisions for the country that seemed so arbitrary and self-defeating, like randomly becoming wild with rage that Napoleon had conquered Malta, that his friend privately wondered if maybe Paul wasn't all there. I mean, what did Russia have to do with Malta anyway? Why did he care?

As Emperor, Paul put his troops in Prussian-style uniforms and forced them to parade outside his palace at 11 a.m. every single day. If you can imagine, the elite soldiers who served the Tsar did not enjoy being treated like show ponies. But Paul's real troubles would come from offending the nobles. Some of Paul's political ideals weren't bad, he banned corporal punishment for the lower classes and tried not quite successfully to make things a little bit better for the serfs. But those efforts were part of a larger campaign for Paul to weaken the entrenched aristocracy that had been the center of his mother's world. But as Paul would learn, even czars can overestimate their power to deadly consequences. Part of Paul's strangeness was an obsession with medieval shivered. and knights of old. He forced all of his advisors to adopt a code of chivalry with random rules of

bowing and kneeling. If any of them weren't dressed to Paul's exact specifications, even something as little as a missing button, he went wild. Frankly, all of his advisors thought it was a little much. Paul knew that he had enemies, and so his paranoia was probably justified when he declared that he wanted a new grand palace built in St. Petersburg because he no longer felt safe in the winter palace. And so the palace of St. Michael was built according to his exact specifications, an architectural chimera that was half Russian classical style and half medieval English castle, complete with full moat and drawbridge. It was completed in 1801, but Paul would sleep there for only 40 nights before his murder.

On a cold Monday night, Sir Paul I hosted dinner at the Palace of St. Michael. His son, Alexander, was present, sitting on the far side of the table and struggling to make eye contact with his father. With some food and drink still on the table, Paul stood, shoving his chair away, and declared that he was off to bed, to retire in his own apartments. The eating, but more importantly, the drinking didn't stop for some of the other high-ranking officers, present. They drank and continued to drink, and then they made their move. A group of disgruntled officers made their way to Paul's bedchambers, where they physically overpowered two valets and knocked down Paul's door. The bedroom was empty. There was a single burning candle, and a bed with rumpled sheets, but no Emperor Paul. The bird has flown, one of the men said.

Another felt the sheets of the bed. Perhaps, but not far, he responded. The nest is still warm. They found the emperor cowering behind a curtain. Though the Tsar tried to beat them away, he was battered and strangled with a scarf and ultimately stabbed with a sword by General Nikolay Zubov. The rest of the group forced him to the ground

and trampled him to death. It's possible that the group hadn't initially planned on murdering the emperor, that they, drunk on adrenaline and liquor, simply got carried away. They had brought with them abdication papers that presumably they were planning on forcing Paul to sign. But then again, one of the conspirators had asked another what they would do if Paul wasn't willing to sign away his power, making an omelette requires the breaking of eggs. The other man replied ominously. Immediately after the Tsar was killed,

Nicolay went to find the young Alexander, 23 years old, and the new emperor. Time to grow up, Nicolay said. Go and rule. Alexander knew that the men were planning on overthrowing his father, but no one had told him that his father's blood would be on his hands. He would have a guilty conscience for the rest of his sons. life, but he wouldn't punish the assassins.

Alexander went on ruling, and the official court physician declared that Emperor Paul I had died of apoplexy. Coincidentally, that's the exact same thing the official report had said Paul's own father, Peter, had died of. That's the sad, short reign of Paul I, but keep listening after this brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about his legacy. If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what, what if I started that?

This is for you. I'm telling you I had nothing to my name. I didn't know a single person in New York. And somehow I'm dressed by Oscar de Laurentia walking down that red carpet. This month, we sit down with entrepreneurs and creators who actually did it, who turned the scary leap into a business, a paycheck, and a life they are proud of. Direct center of our happiness or our regrets is whether or not we're taking action on the things It matter to us.

They're not selfish. They're so important. They actually lead to our greatest contributions because when we're living fulfilled, we actually show up better everywhere. We lead better. We're better friends. We're better relationships and collaborators and all those things because we have passion about the things we're doing.

If you're trying to build something of your own this year, join us in these conversations that will make you braver and smarter with your money. Listen to Dos Amigos as part of the Michael Tutta Podcast Network available on the I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you can. get your podcast. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? In 1998, my life was forever changed when I took on the role of Charlotte York on a new show called Sex and the City. Now I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and relive all of the incredible moments this show brought us on and off the screen. Like when Sarah Jessica Parker shared that she forgot

we filmed the pilot episode. You forgot about it? In the very long time they took to pick us out. And when the show was picked up, I panicked. And Cynthia Nixon reveals if she's a Miranda. We both feel confident about our brains. But that's kind of where it ends. Plus, Sex and the City super fan, Megan V. Stelion, doesn't hold back on her opinions of the show. Carrie will literally go set New York on fire and then come back and type about it at the end of the day. Like half of it wasn't her fault.

Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you. get your podcasts. In terms of popular Russian monarchs, Paul is pretty much overshadowed by his much more famous mother. But he did get the big screen treatment, a 1928 film called The Patriot directed by Ernest Lubitsch. The film was mostly silent, but it won the second ever Oscar for Best Writing. It was also nominated for Best Picture, and so I assume it had to have been a great movie. I use the past tense there because the movie is lost. Only pieces of it are left. To date, no complete copy of the film The Patriot has ever been found. It's the only best picture nominee in history for which that's true. But some pieces of Paul's legacy are still around, at least his

genetic legacy. Out of the ten children that he and his wife had, several went to. And on to marry into prominent European monarchies. Through his grandchildren, Paul I is an ancestor of the current royal families of Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden. And he is related through the late Prince Philip to Charles, Prince of Wales. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio

and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams. and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? In 1998,

my life was forever changed when I took on the role of Charlotte York on a new show called Sex and the City. Now I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and relive all of the incredible moments this show brought us on and off the screen. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.