Obstruction met his well-meant efforts to promote the general good, and before twelve months of the presidential term had run public affairs were at a deadlock.
She proclaimed, therefore, as heir-apparent the son of her deceased elder sister Anna, Charles Peter Ulrich, duke of HolsteinGottorp, a German in character, habits and religion, and tried to Russianize him by making him adopt the Eastern Orthodox faith and live in St Petersburg during the whole of her reign; but her well-meant efforts were singularly unsuccessful.
After breakfast " he was expected," he says, to spend an hour with Mrs Gibbon; after tea his father claimed his conversation; in the midst of an interesting work he was often called down to entertain idle visitors; and, worst of all, he was periodically compelled to return the well-meant compliments.
He might have been overlooked but for the well-meant, indignant officiousness of his father.
The effects of this policy of blind obscurantism far outweighed any good that resulted from the king's well-meant efforts at economic and financial reform; and seven this reform was but spasmodic and partial, and awoke ultimately more discontent than it allayed.
