ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the lasting influence of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who had impressed upon the young grand duchess 'that to rule one must create divisions', which was the nobility's role as an 'intermediate' power between sovereign and people that led Montesquieu to pronounce 'no monarch, no nobility. No less prolific when Catherine II turned from literature to law, her self-confessed bouts of 'legislomania' generated a series of monuments for the Russian statute book. Notwithstanding Catherine's attempts to steer business through 'the proper channels', her officials, conscious of her obsession with detail, continued to refer doubtful cases. Landless noble bureaucrats and hereditary serf-owners had already begun to develop the distinguishing characteristics that would set them even further apart in the nineteenth century. Across early-modern Europe, monarchs lived to varying degrees in competitive tension with their nobles. Nobles depended on strong government to secure their individual liberty and property, and relied on royal arbitration to resolve disputes between themselves.
