Furthermore, the young Empress, feeling at last secure of her own position, began to assert herself far more than she had ever done before, and she tried to win for herself partisans. Unfortunately she looked for them among people who turned out afterwards to be her worst foes, and the liberty which she imagined she had acquired to live her own life without any regard to the trammels of etiquette or other consideration, transformed the dislike she had hitherto inspired into something very much akin to hatred. Her boy proved a delicate child, and when the fact became known it awakened the hopes of the party antagonistic to Alexandra and raised those of the people attached to the fortunes of the Grand Duke Michael. His sister-in-law, when she found this out (and there were but too many people eager to inform her of it), grew in her turn to dislike the Grand Duke, and to think how she could get rid of him. According to the family statute of the Romanoffs, he would have been Regent of the Empire in case the Czar had died before his heir had reached his majority, and the Empress, in that case, would have been more or less subjected to him and to any commands he would have deemed it necessary to issue to her. Most likely the first thing he would have done would have been to deprive her of the custody of her son and to surround the latter with men of his own choice. The very thought of such a contingency made Alexandra Feodorovna wild, so when the Grand Duke contracted the morganatic marriage which brought upon him the wrath of his brother she seized upon the occasion to try to get rid once and forever of a personage whom she considered her worst enemy.