Elizabeth Alexeievna (Louise of Baden) - Russian Empress

Russian Empress

The eccentricities of Tsar Paul I led to a plot to overthrow him and place Alexander on the Russian throne. Elizabeth was well aware of this scheme and on the night of Paul's assassination, she was with her husband giving him support.

Once Alexander I became Emperor, Elizabeth Alexeievna encouraged him to leave behind the trauma of Paul's I murder and dedicate himself to serve Russia. As Empress Consort, she took part in Court life and the duties of representation, but the first female rank in the Empire was reserved for her mother-in-law Maria Feodorovna.

Alexander I treated his wife indifferently, he was polite toward her in public ceremonies and made an effort to have his meals in her company. Elizabeth was too soft and placid to keep a hold on a restless and soul tortured man such as her husband. In 1803, Alexander began a love affair that would continue for more than fifteen years with the Polish Princess Maria Czetwertynska, wife of Prince Dmitri Naryshkin. Princess Maria Naryshkina flaunted her liaison at Court in a tasteless, blatant fashion.

Elizabeth Alexeievna, for her part, found solace in her relationship with Adam Czartoryski, who had returned to Russia at Alexander I's ascension to the throne. This liaison ended when she started a love affair with a handsome staff-captain, Alexis Okhotnikov. All the correspondence between Elizabeth and Alexis Okhotnikov (and some of her diaries) were destroyed by the Emperor Nicholas I after her death.

The affair with Okhotnikov had a tragic end. The staff-captain died in 1807 after an attempt on his life. Many contemporaries considered that Alexander I or his brother Grand Duke Konstantin had ordered him killed.

On 16 November 1806, Elizabeth gave birth to a second daughter. There were rumors that the newborn, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alexandrovna, was not a child of Emperor Alexander but of Okhotnikov. After his death, Elizabeth Alexeievna felt more abandoned than ever and poured out all her affection on her daughter Elizabeth, "Lisinka." Fifteen months later, the little girl died suddenly of an infection blamed on teething. "Now," wrote Elizabeth to her mother, "I am not longer good for anything in this world, my soul has no more strength to recover from this last blow."

The death of their daughter temporarily brought husband and wife closer. Although Elizabeth Alexeievna was not yet thirty years old, neither she nor Alexander had further hopes of a family and they would have no more children.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Elizabeth Alexeievna was a reliable supporter of her husband's policies as she had been in other personal and political crises. After the fall of Napoleon, she joined her husband and many of the crowned heads of Europe in the Congress of Vienna (1814), there she was reunited with her old paramour, Adam Czartoryski. He was still in love with her and forgave her past infidelity with Okhotnikov. Their re-encounter was short-lived.

Once she reached forty, Elizabeth Alexeievna's beauty was largely faded; she left behind any romantic pretensions. Her husband also experienced a personal transformation that drove the couple closer than they ever were. In 1819, Alexander I, immersed in religious mysticism, broke his long relationship with Maria Narishkina. From then on, husband and wife started to spend more time together. The Empress sympathized deeply with him and Alexander found her supportive when he lost his beloved natural daughter, Sophia. The marked reconciliation between the Emperor and the Empress caused general surprise "I am reduced to thinking of myself sometimes as Alexander's mistress, or as if we had been married secretly..." Elizabeth wrote to her mother.

By 1825, Elizabeth Alexeievna's health was frail; she suffered from a lung condition and a nervous indisposition. The doctors recommended her to take a rest in a temperate climate and suggested the southern city of Taganrog, by the sea of Azov. With no comfortable Palace, the Imperial Couple were established in a modest house in Taganrog by 5 October. They were happy together living in intimate simplicity. On 17 November 1825 Alexander returned to Taganrog from visiting Crimea with a cold, which developed into typhus, from which he died that December in the arms of his wife. Elizabeth was stricken by her loss, writing ‘I do not understand myself, I do not understand my destiny." And later " What am I to do with my will, which was entirely subjected to him, with my life, which I loved to devote to him?"

The now-Dowager-Tsarina was too frail to come back to St. Petersburg for the funeral. When Elizabeth Alexeievna finally started her returning journey to the capital, she felt so sick that had to stop at Belev, Tula Province, on the road from Taganrog to St. Petersburg just a few hours before she was to meet her mother-in-law, who was coming south to greet her. In the early hours of 16 May 1826, towards four-thirty in the morning, when her lady's maid went to check on the Empress, she found her dead in bed. Elizabeth Alexeievna had died of heart failure.

Three days after her husband's death Elizabeth had written her mother, "Do not worry too much about me, but if I dared, I would like to follow the one who has been my very life."