Samborsky had long lived in England and taught Alexander and his brother Constantine excellent English, a very uncommon accouterment for potential Russian autocrats of the time.

[17] Some sources[18] allege that the empress Catherine planned to remove her son Paul from the succession altogether (in consideration of his unstable temperament and bizarre personality traits) and make Alexander her successor instead.

While retaining for a time the old ministers, one of the first acts of his reign was to appoint the Private Committee, comprising young and enthusiastic friends of his own—Viktor Kochubey, Nikolay Novosiltsev, Pavel Stroganov and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski—to draw up a plan of domestic reform, which was supposed to result in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in accordance with the teachings of the Age of Enlightenment.

Castlereagh, writing of him to Lord Liverpool, gave him credit for "grand qualities", but added that he is "suspicious and undecided";[13] and to Jefferson he was a man of estimable character, disposed to do good, and expected to diffuse through the mass of the Russian people "a sense of their natural rights".

Soon afterwards, at Memel, he entered into a close alliance with Prussia, not as he boasted from motives of policy, but in the spirit of true chivalry, out of friendship for the young King Frederick William III and his beautiful wife Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Carried away by the enthusiasm of Frédéric-César de La Harpe, who had returned to Russia from Paris, Alexander began openly to proclaim his admiration for French institutions and for the person of Napoleon Bonaparte.

[27] Later on, La Harpe and his friend Henri Monod lobbied Alexander, who persuaded the other Allied powers opposing Napoleon to recognise Vaudois and Argovian independence, in spite of Bern's attempts to reclaim them as subject lands.

In his instructions to Niklolay Novosiltsev, his special envoy in London, the emperor elaborated the motives of his policy in language that appealed little to the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger.

Yet the document is of great interest, as it formulates for the first time in an official dispatch the ideals of international policy that were to play a conspicuous part in world affairs at the close of the revolutionary epoch.

A party too in Russia itself, headed by the Tsar's brother Constantine Pavlovich, was clamorous for peace; but Alexander, after a vain attempt to form a new coalition, summoned the Russian nation to a holy war against Napoleon as the enemy of the Orthodox faith.

He would divide with Alexander the Empire of the world; as a first step he would leave him in possession of the Danubian Principalities and give him a free hand to deal with Finland; and, afterwards, the Emperors of the East and West, when the time should be ripe, would drive the Turks from Europe and march across Asia to the conquest of India.

He realised that in Napoleon sentiment never got the better of reason, that as a matter of fact he had never intended his proposed "grand enterprise" seriously, and had only used it to preoccupy the mind of the Tsar while he consolidated his own power in Central Europe.

He used it initially to remove "the geographical enemy" from the gates of Saint Petersburg by wresting Finland from Sweden (1809), and he hoped further to make the Danube the southern frontier of Russia.

[31][32] Alexander complained that the Treaty of Schönbrunn, which added largely to the Duchy of Warsaw, had "ill requited him for his loyalty", and he was only mollified for the time being by Napoleon's public declaration that he had no intention of restoring Poland, and by a convention, signed on 4 January 1810, but not ratified, abolishing the Polish name and orders of chivalry.

Napoleon's answer was to refuse to ratify the 4 January convention, and to announce his engagement to the Archduchess Marie Louise in such a way as to lead Alexander to suppose that the two marriage treaties had been negotiated simultaneously.

[citation needed] The minister of war, Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, had managed the reform and improvement of the Imperial Russian Army before the start of the 1812 campaign.

Following an almost ten-year stalemate centred around what is now Dagestan, east Georgia, Azerbaijan, northern Armenia, with neither party being able to gain the clear upper hand, Russia eventually managed to turn the tide.

After a series of successful offensives led by General Pyotr Kotlyarevsky, including a decisive victory in the Siege of Lankaran, Persia was forced to sue for peace.

[42][d] The campaign of 1812 was the turning point for Alexander's life; after the burning of Moscow, he declared that his own soul had found illumination, and that he had realized once and for all the divine revelation to him of his mission as the peacemaker of Europe.

When the remnants of the French army eventually crossed the Berezina river in November, only 27,000 soldiers remained; the Grande Armée had lost some 380,000 men dead and 100,000 captured.

[citation needed] With the Russian army following up victory over Napoleon in 1812, the Sixth Coalition was formed with Russia, Prussia, Great Britain, Sweden, Spain, and other nations.

[citation needed] Alexander tried to calm the unrest of his conscience by correspondence with the leaders of the evangelical revival on the continent and sought for omens and supernatural guidance in texts and passages of scripture.

It was not, however, according to his own account, until he met the Baroness de Krüdener—a religious adventuress who made the conversion of princes her special mission—at Basel, in the autumn of 1813, that his soul found peace.

Madame de Krüdener, and her colleague, the evangelist Henri-Louis Empaytaz, became the confidants of the emperor's most secret thoughts; and during the campaign that ended in the occupation of Paris the imperial prayer-meetings were the oracle on whose revelations hung the fate of the world.

For Madame de Krüdener was not the only influence behind the throne; and, though Alexander had declared war against the Revolution, La Harpe (his erstwhile tutor) was once more at his elbow, and the catchwords of the gospel of humanity were still on his lips.

Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, whose single-minded aim was the restoration of "a just equilibrium" in Europe, reproached the Tsar to his face for a "conscience" which led him to imperil the concert of the powers by keeping his hold on Poland in violation of his treaty obligation.

[48] Once a supporter of limited liberalism, as seen in his approval of the representative institutions in the Ionian Islands, Grand Duchy of Finland and the Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815,[49][50] from the end of the year 1818 Alexander's views began to change.

Though alarmed by the revolutionary agitation in Germany, which culminated in the murder of his agent, the dramatist August von Kotzebue (23 March 1819), Alexander joined Castlereagh's protest against Metternich's collective security policy of "the governments contracting an alliance against the peoples", as formulated in the Carlsbad Decrees of July 1819.

In the seclusion of the little town of Troppau, where in October 1820 the powers met in conference, Metternich cemented his influence over Alexander, which had been wanting amid the turmoil and intrigues of Vienna and Aix.

In January, Alexander had still upheld the ideal of a free confederation of the European states, the Holy Alliance, against the policy of a dictatorship of the great powers, the Quadruple Treaty.