Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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HER FAVOURITES

And Catherine (we must say thus much for Catherine)

Though bold and bloody, was the kind of thing

Whose temporary passion was quite flattering

Because each lover looked a sort a king

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 70

An order from Her Majesty consigned

Our young Lieutenant to the genial care

Of those in office. All the world looked kind

(As it will look sometimes with the first stare,

Which youth would not act ill to keep in mind,)

As also did Miss Protassoff then there,

Named from her mystic office l’Eprouveuse,

A term inexplicable to the Muse.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 84

The love affair of Prince Potemkin and Catherine II appeared to end there, but it never truly ceased. It simply became a marriage in which both fell in love and had sexual affairs with others, while the relationship with each other remained the most important thing in their lives. This unusual marital arrangement inspired the obscene mythology of the nymphomaniac Empress and Potemkin the imperial pimp. Perhaps the ‘Romantic Movement’, and the serial love marriages and divorces of our own time, have ruined our ability to understand their touching partnership.

Zavadovsky was the first official favourite to share the Empress’s bed while Potemkin ruled her mind, continuing to serve as her consort, friend and minister. During her sixty-seven years, we know that Catherine had at least twelve lovers, hardly the army of which she stands accused. Even this is deceptive because, once she had found a partner with whom she was happy, she believed it would last for ever. She very rarely ended the relationships herself – Saltykov and Poniatowski had been removed from her; Orlov had been unfaithful and even Potemkin had somehow contrived to withdraw. Nonetheless, after Potemkin, her relationships with men much younger than her were obviously abnormal, but then so was her situation.

The reality was very different from the myth. She did make her lover into an official position, and Potemkin helped her. The triangular relationship between Catherine, Potemkin and her young lovers has been neglected by historians – yet this became the heart of her own ‘family’.

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Catherine’s affair with Zavadovsky was the test case for the imperial ménage-à-trois. Potemkin’s presence made life for the favourites more difficult and humiliating, because they could not avoid Catherine’s intimacy with him. Their relationship with Serenissimus was almost as important as their love for the Empress. Even without Potemkin, this was a difficult role and Zavadovsky was soon deeply miserable.

Catherine’s letters to Zavadovsky give us a wonderful glimpse into the suffocating world of the favourites. He lasted barely eighteen months in favour but his love for Catherine was genuine. Her letters to him reveal she loved him too. But there was less equality between them. Even though he was the same age as Potemkin, he was in awe of her and she treated him patronizingly, thanking him for his ‘most affectionate little letter’ as if he was clever to have known his alphabet. While Potemkin wanted time and space to himself, Zavadovsky longed to be with her every moment of the day, like a lapdog, so she had to write and explain that ‘Time belongs, not to me, but to the Empire’. Yet they worked together – he still toiled in her secretariat all day before retiring with her at ten, after playing three rubbers of whist. It was a routine that was both tiresome and hard work.

The new favourite was also supposedly far less sexually experienced than the Prince, which is perhaps why he fell in love with her so absolutely. ‘You are Vesuvius itself,’ she wrote. His inexperience perhaps caused him to lose control, for she added: ‘when you least expect it an eruption appears but no, never mind, I shall extinguish them with caresses. Petrusha dear!’. She corresponded less formally with Zavadovsky than with Potemkin. While the former called her ‘Katiusha’ or ‘Katia’, the Prince had always used ‘Matushka’, ‘Sovereign Lady’. The Empress’s letters to Zavadovsky seem more sexually explicit: ‘Petrushinka, I rejoice that you have been healed by my little pillows and if my caress facilitates your health then you will never be sick.’ These ‘pillows’ may have meant her breasts – but she also embroidered herb-filled cushions, an example of the comical dangers of biographers making sexual interpretations of personal letters.¹

Zavadovsky, who loved her so much, was often sick, more from nerves than anything else. He was not suited to being the subject of such intrigue and hatred. While she repeatedly declared her love for him in her letters, he could not relax in his position: his private life was ‘under a microscope’.² She did not understand what he was up against and he did not have the strength that Potemkin employed to get what he wanted from everyone. Above all, he had to tolerate Potemkin’s omnipresence. It was a threesome and, when Potemkin wanted attention, he presumably got it. When they had crises in their relationship, it was Potemkin who sorted them out: ‘both of us need a restoration of spiritual peace!’ wrote Catherine. ‘I have been suffering on a par with you for three months, torturing myself…I will talk to Prince Gri[gory] A[lexandrovich Potemkin].’ This talk with Potemkin about Zavadovsky’s private feelings could hardly have helped his spiritual peace. Afterwards, Zavadovsky claimed that he was quite unfazed by Potemkin’s ever present flamboyance, but the evidence suggests that he was intimidated and upset by him and hid when he was near by. ‘I do not understand’, the Empress wrote to Zavadovsky, ‘why you cannot see me without tears in your eyes.’ When Potemkin became a prince, Catherine invited, or rather ordered, Zavadovsky: ‘If you went to congratulate the new Highness, His Highness will receive you affectionately. If you lock yourself up, neither I nor anybody else will be accustomed to see you.’³

There was a story, told years later, that Potemkin lost his temper with the Empress, told her to dismiss Zavadovsky, stormed through their apartments, almost attacked them and then tossed a candlestick at Catherine.⁴ This sounds like one of Potemkin’s tantrums, but we cannot know what provoked it. Potemkin may have decided that Zavadovsky was a bore; it may also have had something to do with his friendship with Potemkin’s critics like Simon Vorontsov. Zavadovsky certainly had a mean-minded, parochial streak that was utterly alien to Serenissimus – and it may have irritated Catherine herself.

The diplomats noticed Zavadovsky’s plight. Even in mid-1776, when he had only just been unveiled, as it were, Corberon was wondering ‘the name of the new favourite…because they say Zavadovsky is well on the decline’. The diplomatic business of analysing Catherine’s favouritism was always an inexact mixture of Kremlinology and ‘tabloid-style’ gossip – a question of reading bluffs and double-bluffs. As the Frenchman put it, ‘they base his disgrace on his promotion’.

Within a year, though, an upset Catherine noticed his misery too. In May 1777, she wrote to Zavadovsky: ‘Prince Or[lov] told me that you want to go. I agree to it…After dinner…I can meet with you.’ They had a painful chat which Catherine, of course, reported in detail to Potemkin: ‘I…asked him, did he have something to say to me or not? He told me about it,’ and she let him choose an intermediary, like a cross between a literary agent and a divorce lawyer, to negotiate his terms of dismissal. ‘He chose Count Kirill Razumovsky…through tears…Bye, bye dear,’ she added to Potemkin. ‘Enjoy the books!’ She had obviously sent him a present for his growing library. Once Razumovsky had negotiated Zavadovsky’s retreat, Catherine gave him ‘three or four thousand souls…plus 50,000 roubles this year and 30,000 in future years with a silver service for sixteen…’.

This took an emotional toll on Catherine. ‘I’m suffering in heart and soul,’ she told Potemkin.⁵ She was always generous to her lovers but, as we shall see, she gave far less to Zavadovsky than to anyone else except Vassilchikov. There was truth in the canard of Masson, the Swiss tutor: ‘Catherine was indulgent in love but implacable in politics.’⁶

Zavadovsky was distraught. Catherine assumed the tone of a Norland nanny and told him to calm himself by translating Tacitus – a therapy unique to the age of neo-Classicism. Then, inevitably, she consoled the unhappy man by adding that, in order that Prince Potemkin ‘be friendly with you as before, it is not difficult to make the effort…your minds will share the same feeling about me and therefore become closer to one another’. There can be little doubt that the prospect of having to win over Potemkin can only have made Zavadovsky’s wounds even more raw. He was heartbroken: ‘Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt: [her] love for me has vanished.’ On 8 June, Zavadovsky retreated bitterly to the Ukraine. ‘Prince Potemkin’, said the new British envoy, Sir James Harris, ‘is now again at the highest pitch.’⁷ It goes without saying that Catherine, who could not be ‘without love for an hour’,⁸ had already found someone else.

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On Saturday, 27 May 1777, the Empress arrived at Potemkin’s new estate of Ozerki, outside Petersburg. When they sat down for dinner, there was a cannon salute to welcome her. Potemkin always entertained opulently. There were thirty-five guests, the top courtiers, the Prince’s nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina Engelhardt, his cousins Pavel and Mikhail Potemkin – and, at the very bottom of the list, Major of the Hussars Semyon Gavrilovich Zorich, a swarthy, curly-haired and athletic Serb aged thirty-one. It was his first appearance at an official reception, yet it seems that Catherine had already met him. Zorich, a handsome daredevil already known as ‘Adonis’ by the ladies at Court and as a ‘vrai sauvage’ by everyone else, was something of a war hero. Potemkin remembered him from the army. Zorich had been captured by the Turks. Prisoners were often decapitated in the exuberance of the moment, but noblemen were preserved for ransom – so Zorich loudly proclaimed himself a count and survived.

On his return, this ambitious rogue wrote to Potemkin and was appointed to his entourage. Potemkin’s aides-de-camp were obviously introduced to Court – and the Empress noticed him. Within a few days, Zorich was the new official favourite and his life changed instantly. He was the first of Catherine’s succession of so-called favourites or mignons who took the role as an official appointment. While raving about Zorich’s looks and calling him ‘Sima’ or ‘Senyusha’, Catherine was missing her Potemkin. ‘Give Senyusha the attached letters,’ she asked her consort. ‘It’s so dull without you.’⁹ Just as modest Zavadovsky was an antidote to the ebullient Potemkin, so the excitable Serb was a relief after the moping Zavadovsky. The latter heard about the emergence of Zorich and rushed back to Petersburg, staying with his friends, the Vorontsovs.

Zavadovsky suffered like ‘a stricken stag’ – and the Court treated him like one. He was told to behave himself. The Empress ‘respected’ him but suggested that he restrain himself ‘in order to extinguish the alarm.’¹⁰ What alarm? The Empress’s perhaps. But surely also the hypochondriacal, nailbiting Potemkin. In any case, Zavadovsky learned that, since he was not going to be reinstated, the courtiers no longer paid him much attention. He went back to his work. One warms to Zavadovsky for his diligent state service and his romantic pain, but he also spent the next twenty years moaning to his friends about Potemkin’s omnipotence and extravagance. He remained devoted to Catherine and did not marry for another ten years. And when he built his palace at Ekaterinodar (Catherine’s Gift) – with its 250 rooms, porcelain stones, malachite fireplaces, full library – its centrepiece was a lifesize statue of Catherine.¹¹ But he was not a typical favourite because, while the Empress never gave him independent political power as she did to Potemkin, he enjoyed a distinguished career under Catherine and afterwards.^*1

Catherine was in love with Zorich. Potemkin was happy with his former adjutant and gave him a plume of diamonds for his hat and a superb cane.¹² Catherine, who was to work so hard to make her favourites respect Potemkin, wrote: ‘My dear Prince, I have received the plume, given it to Sima and Sima wears it, thanks to you.’ Since the vain King Gustavus III of Sweden was on a visit, she laughingly compared the two dandies.¹³ Zorich, who liked to strut around in the finest clothes, resembled nothing so much as a finely feathered fighting cock, but the vrai sauvage was soon out of his depth. He also suffered from the addiction of the age: gambling. Once Catherine had recovered from her early delight in his looks and vigour, she realized he was a liability. It was not the gambling that mattered – the Empress played daily and Potemkin all night – but his inability to understand his position vis-à-vis the Prince.¹⁴

Within a few months, everyone knew he would have to be dismissed and the diplomats were once again trying to guess the next lover. ‘There is a Persian candidate in case of Monsieur de Zorich’s resignation,’ wrote Sir James Harris as early as 2 February 1778. But Zorich swaggered around, announcing in a loud voice that, if he was dismissed, he was ‘resolved to call his successor to account’ – in other words to challenge him to a duel. This muscular braggadocio would really bring Catherine’s court into contempt. Far from delaying his fall, as he no doubt thought, this was precisely the sort of behaviour that made it inevitable. ‘By God,’ he threatened, ‘I’ll cut the ears of whoever takes my place.’ Soon Harris thought he had spotted another candidate for favourite. Like all the diplomats, Sir James believed that it was ‘probable that Potemkin will be commissioned to look out for a fresh minion and I have heard…that he already has picked on one Acharov – a Lieutenant of Police in Moscow, middle-aged, well made, more of a Hercules than Apollo.’¹⁵

Three months later, with the Court at Tsarkoe Selo for the summer, Zorich remained in place. When the Empress attended the theatre, Harris claimed the Prince presented to her a ‘tall hussar officer, one of his adjutants. She distinguished him a good deal.’ The moment Catherine had gone, Zorich ‘fell upon Potemkin in a very violent manner, made use of the strongest expressions of abuse and insisted on his fighting him’. Potemkin refused this insolent request with contempt. Zorich stormed into the imperial apartments and boasted what he had done. ‘When Potemkin appeared he was ill-received and Zorich seemed in favour.’

Potemkin left Tsarskoe Selo and returned to town. But, as so often with Potemkin and Catherine, appearances were deceptive. The sauvage was ordered to gallop all the way to St Petersburg in the Prince’s wake and humiliatingly invite him to supper to make friends. Serenissimus returned. The supper was held: ‘they are apparently good friends’. Zorich had made the mistake of crossing Prince Potemkin, though that in itself was not decisive, since virtually all the favourites crossed him at one time or another. But Sir James had the measure of Potemkin: ‘an artful man’, who, ‘in the end, will get the better of Zorich’s bluntness’.¹⁶

Sure enough, just six days later, Harris reported Zorich’s dismissal, ‘conveyed to him very gently by the Empress herself’. Zorich exploded in bitter reproaches, probably about Potemkin. He had already been granted the exceedingly valuable estate of Shklov, with 7,000 souls and an ‘immense sum of ready money’. He was last recorded at Court on 13 May.¹⁷ A day later, Catherine met Serenissimus for dinner at the Kerekinsky Palace on the way home from Tsarkoe Selo: ‘The child had gone and that’s all,’ she wrote after discussing Potemkin’s military plans, ‘as for the rest, we’ll discuss it together…’. She was most likely referring to the object of her new-found happiness.

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At the Kerekinsky, Prince Potemkin arrived with ‘Major Ivan Nikolaevich Rimsky-Korsakov’. Naturally, by the time Catherine parted with Zorich, she was already infatuated with a new friend. Zorich was still making blustering threats when Rimsky-Korsakov was appointed Potemkin’s adjutant on 8 May.¹⁸ Far from being a heartless hedonist, Catherine always experienced emotional crises, if not complete collapse, during these changes. Zorich was still brooding in St Petersburg when, according to Harris, Catherine contemplated recalling ‘the plain and quiet’ Zavadovsky. Potemkin ‘who has more cunning for effecting the purposes of the day than any man living, contrived to effect these good resolutions…’. He ‘introduced’ Korsakov ‘at the critical moment’.

A couple of days later, the Empress, along with her Court and many of Potemkin’s family, including two of his nieces, set off to stay at another of the Prince’s estates ‘to forget her cares…in the society of her new minion’. Potemkin’s estate was Eschenbaum (Osinovaya Rocha) ‘on the confines of Finland’. If one reads Catherine’s letter to Grimm from Eschenbaum, in which she raved about the views of lakes and woods from her window while grumbling that her entourage had to squeeze into a mere ten bedrooms, one would have no idea that her new passion had already hit a snag. Two grand and libidinous middle-aged women were competing for the attentions of Potemkin’s pretty adjutant.¹⁹

There were twenty guests out at Eschenbaum, including of course Potemkin’s old friend Countess Bruce, supposedly the sampler of Catherine’s lovers. Someone else – it must be Countess Bruce – was also attracted to the fine Korsakov. Catherine had noticed and hesitated before letting herself go. ‘I’m afraid of burning my fingers and it’s better not to lead into temptation…’, she wrote to Potemkin in an enigmatic appeal in which she seemed to be asking him to get someone to keep her distance: ‘I’m afraid that the last day dispelled the imaginary attraction which I hope is only one-sided and which can easily be stopped by your clever guidance.’ She obviously wanted the ‘child’ herself, but ‘I don’t want, wanting and I want, without wishing…that’s as clear as the day!’ Even in this oblique gibberish, it was clear she was falling in love – but wished the competition to be removed.

Potemkin’s ‘clever guidance’ did the trick. Countess Bruce, if it was she, backed off and Catherine claimed her new mignon.²⁰ The house-party ended. Two days later, on 1 June, Korsakov was officially appointed adjutant-general to the Empress. In an age of neo-Classicism, Rimsky-Korsakov, aged twenty-four, immediately struck her with his Grecian ‘ancient beauty’, so that she soon nicknamed him ‘Pyrrhus, King of Epirus’. In her letters to Grimm, she claimed he was so beautiful that he was ‘the failure of painters, the despair of sculptors’.²¹ Catherine seemed to choose alternate types because Korsakov was as elegant and artistic as Zorich has been muscular and macho: portraits show his exquisitely Classical features. He loved to sing, and Catherine told Prince Orlov that he had a voice ‘like a nightingale’. Singing lessons were arranged. He was showered with gifts – 4,000 souls and presents worth half a million roubles. Arrogant, vain and not terribly clever, he was ‘good-natured but silly.’²²

Once again, Catherine was wildly happy with her new companion: ‘Adieu mon bijou,’ she wrote to Potemkin in a summary of their special marriage. ‘Thanks to you and the King of Epirus, I am as happy as a chaffinch and I want you to be just as happy.’²³ With the Empress happy, the Prince, increasingly busy running the army and governing the south, was so supreme that when Zavadovsky finally returned to Petersburg to find another favourite ensconced in his old apartment, he was shocked that Potemkin ‘doesn’t have any balance against him. In all the centuries’, he grumbled to Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, ‘God has not created such a universal person as this. Prince P is everywhere and everything is him!’²⁴

Catherine wrote passionately to her ‘King of Epirus: ‘my impatience to see the one who for me is the best of God’s creatures is so great: I longed for him more than 24 hours and have gone to meet him.’ Or as Harris put it drily: ‘Korsakov enjoys all the affection and favour which attend novelty.’ Korsakov was certainly enjoying his role, perhaps too much: Potemkin suggested that he should be made gentleman of the bedchamber, but Korsakov wanted to jump straight to chamberlain. When the mignon got his way, Catherine gave Pavel Potemkin the honour as well, to compensate Serenissimus. Soon Korsakov was a major-general; the King of Poland sent him the Golden Eagle, which he always wore. Catherine’s hunger for Korsakov sings through the letters. She sounded pathetically grateful, writing: ‘Thank you for loving me.’²⁵

There were already ominous signs which the Empress alone could not, or would not, see. Even in her letters, Korsakov never seemed to be with her and she never seemed to know where he was. Here is a glimpse of her suffocating neediness and his avoidance of her companionship: ‘I’m unable to forget you for a moment. When will I see you?’ Soon she sounded almost feverish: ‘If he doesn’t come back soon, I’ll run away from here and go looking for him in every place in town.’ It was this emotional appetite that ruled Catherine and made her surprisingly vulnerable – the Achilles’ heel of this otherwise indestructible political machine.²⁶

It was not long before Catherine, hooked on the shallow youngster, was upset again. In early August 1778, just a few months after Korsakov’s appointment, Harris reported to London that the new favourite was already in decline and that Potemkin, Grigory Orlov and Nikita Panin were each struggling to sponsor the replacement. Within a couple of weeks, he even knew ‘the secret in Count Panin’s office by name Strackhov…first noticed at a ball at Peterhof on 28 June’. If the connection lasted, Harris told his Secretary of State for the North, the Earl of Suffolk, ‘it must end in the fall of Potemkin’. By the end of the year, Harris decided that Korsakov was safe again but ‘entirely subservient to the orders of Prince Potemkin and Countess Bruce’.

The mention of Countess Bruce was ominous. By the end of January, the candidates for favourite were multiplying: there was still Strackhov, whose ‘friends were in great hope’, but then there was also Levashev, a major in the Semenovsky Guards, who might have become favourite ‘if a young man by name Svickhosky, patronised by Madame Bruce…had not stabbed himself through disappointment. The wound is not mortal.’ These rumours of Catherine’s affairs were often based on a whisper of gossip which had little foundation, but the diplomatic scandal-mongering signified intense political struggles at Court, even if it was not necessarily what was happening in the imperial bedchamber. Nonetheless Harris was better informed than most because of his friendship with Potemkin. By this time, even a new diplomat in town like Harris knew that Countess Bruce had returned to her ‘violent passion for Korsakov’.

The whole of Petersburg, except sadly the Empress herself, must have been aware that Countess Bruce had only restrained herself from Korsakov for a short time. Since both lived in the Palace only a few yards from the Empress’s bedroom, they conducted their liaison right under Catherine’s nose. Small wonder that the Empress was always looking for the favourite. Countess Bruce, the same age as Catherine and formerly a courtier of discretion and experience, must have lost her head to the beauties of the ‘King of Epirus’.²⁷ Serenissimus and Countess Bruce fell out at this time, possibly over Korsakov. Potemkin, who would have known about the affair almost as soon as it started, wanted to remove Bruce. He must have tried to hint about it delicately to the Empress earlier in September. They rowed. The diplomats thought it was because he was jealous of Panin’s candidate Strackhov.²⁸

The Prince, who did not wish to hurt the Empress nor again lose credit for trying to help, decided to fix the matter. When the Empress was looking around the Palace for the elusive Korsakov, someone loyal to Potemkin would direct her towards a certain room. This person was probably Potemkin’s favourite niece, Alexandra Engelhardt, who was a maid-of-honour. Harris would have heard this story from Alexandra herself since she was the secret recipient of English money.²⁹ Catherine surprised her lover and Countess Bruce in a compromising position, if not in flagrante delicto. There ended the short reign of ‘silly’ Korsakov.

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The Empress was wounded and angry but never vindictive. As late as 10 October 1779, she still wrote kindly to Korsakov: ‘I’m repeating my request to calm yourself and to encourage you. Last week, I demonstrated that I’m taking care of you…’. Despite munificent presents, Korsakov lingered in Petersburg and even boasted of his sexual antics with the Empress in the salons in the most degrading way. Word of it must have reached the protective Potemkin, who loved Catherine too much not to do something about it. When she was discussing whether to reward her next favourite, Serenissimus suggested there should be limits to her generous treatment of Korsakov and the others. Once again, he hurt Catherine’s pride. Her generosity was partly a shield to conceal the depth of her own emotional wounds – and partly an effort to compensate for her age and their youth. According to Corberon, the two argued but later made up.

Korsakov was not finished. He had the effrontery not just to cuckold the Empress but also to cuckold the cuckoldress, Countess Bruce, by beginning an adulterous affair with a Court beauty, Countess Ekaterina Stroganova, who left her husband and child for him. This was too much even for Catherine. The ingrate was despatched to Moscow. An era of Catherine’s private life ended when Countess Bruce, now in disgrace, left the capital to pursue the ‘King of Epirus’ to Moscow. He no longer wanted her and she returned to her husband, Count Yakov Bruce.³⁰ The Court cheerfully plunged into the amorous guessing game that was just as popular as whist and faro.

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The bruised Catherine enjoyed an unusual six months without being in love with anyone. It was at times of unhappiness like this, commented Harris, that Potemkin became even more powerful: did he return to Catherine’s bed to comfort his friend?

It is most likely they temporarily resumed their old habits as they were to do throughout their lives: this is suggested in her letters to Potemkin, which joke about the delicious effects of the ‘chemical medicines of Cagliostro’. The notorious charlatan, Count Cagliostro, rose to European fame in 1777 and became fashionable in Mittau, the Courland capital, before coming to Petersburg at precisely this time.^*2 Catherine raved about ‘Cagliostro’s chemical medicine which is so soft, so agreeable, so handy that it embalms and gives elasticity to the mind and senses – enough, enough, basta, basta, caro amico, I mustn’t bore you too much…’.³¹ This tonic is either a jocular reference to some mystical balm sold by that necromancing snake-oil salesman – or one of Potemkin’s sexual specialities. Since Catherine had little patience for Cagliostro’s alchemy, Freemasonry and marketing of eternal life, but a proven tolerance for Potemkin’s love-making, one can guess which it was.

Meanwhile the courtiers manoeuvred to find the Empress a new favourite. This time there were several candidates, including a certain Staniov, afterwards lost to history, then Roman Vorontsov’s natural son, Ivan Rontsov, who, a year later, emerged in London as the rabble-rousing leader of a Cockney mob in the Gordon Riots. Finally, in the spring of 1780, she found the companion she deserved, a young man named Alexander Dmitrievich Lanskoy.

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Aged only twenty to Catherine’s fifty-one, this ‘very handsome young man’, according to an English visitor, was the gentlest, sweetest and least ambitious of Catherine’s favourites. Sasha Lanskoy ‘of course was not of good character’, said the fast-rising Bezborodko, Catherine’s secretary, but, compared to those who came later, ‘he was a veritable angel’. Bezborodko, who saw everything in Catherine’s office, had reason to know. Though Lanskoy did become embroiled in at least one intrigue against Serenissimus, he was also the favourite who was happiest to join the broader Catherine–Potemkin family.³²

Lanskoy, another Horse-Guardsmen, had been one of Potemkin’s aides-decamp for a few months, which is probably how Catherine noticed him. Yet, according to Harris, who was seeing Potemkin on a daily basis at this time, he was not his first choice. The Prince was persuaded to acquiesce only by imperial gifts of land and money on his birthday that Harris claims came to 900,000 roubles, a sum that beggars avarice. Whether Potemkin did have another candidate, he was eminently flexible in all matters of the boudoir: he supported Lanskoy.

Soon a lieutenant-general, he was Catherine’s ideal pupil and companion. He was not highly educated but keen to learn. He liked painting and architecture. Unlike the others, he tried to avoid politics – though that was not completely possible – and he made an effort to stay friends with Potemkin, though that was not completely feasible either.³³ Despite his taste for splendour and his greedy family, Lanskoy was the best of the minions because he truly adored Catherine and she him. For the next four years, Catherine enjoyed a stable relationship with the calm and good-natured Lanskoy at her side.

In May 1781, there was a slight blip in Catherine’s relationship with Lanskoy. Harris heard the usual rumours that Catherine was having an affair with a new favourite, Mordvinov, but that Potemkin helped to steer the Empress and Lanskoy through this rough patch in their relationship. If Catherine flirted with someone else, Lanskoy was ‘neither jealous, inconstant, nor impertinent and laments the disgrace…in so pathetic a manner’ that Catherine’s love for him revived and she could not bear to part with him.³⁴ They settled down happily into a relationship that she hoped would continue until she died.

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Potemkin benefited enormously from Catherine’s system of favouritism. When she was in a stable relationship, it gave him time to win his place in history. During her happy years with Lanskoy, Potemkin became a statesman – he changed the direction of Russian foreign policy, annexed the Crimea, founded towns, colonized deserts, built the Black Sea Fleet and reformed the Russian army. However, by the end of her life, Catherine’s sexual career was already both a legend and a joke.

Inside Russia, the disapproval of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s moral conduct often coincided with political opposition to their rule among critics, like Simon Vorontsov and the entourage of the ‘Young Court’ of Grand Duke Paul, both excluded from power. The view of a traditional Orthodox aristocrat is expressed in Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov’s On the Corruption of Morals (published long after Catherine’s death) which blamed virtually the entire morality of the eighteenth century on Catherine and Potemkin. Her critics charged that favouritism affected the whole atmosphere of the court: ‘she has set other women the example of the possession of a long…succession of lovers’, grumbled Shcherbatov. As for the wicked puppetmaster, Potemkin radiated ‘love of power, ostentation, pandering to all his desires, gluttony and hence luxury at table, flattery, avarice, rapaciousness’. In other words, the Prince was the source of ‘all the vices known in the world with which he himself is full’.³⁵

This titillating humbug reached its greatest extent during the later years of the Empress when no foreigner could discuss Russia without bringing the subject round to Catherine’s sexuality. When the gossipy Oxford don John Parkinson visited Russia after Potemkin’s death, he picked up and popularized any tidbit he could find and linked it all to Catherine’s love life, even canal building: ‘A party was considering which of the canals had cost the most money; when one of them observed there was not a doubt about the matter. Catherine’s Canal (that is the name of the one of them) had unquestionably been the most expensive.’ Even the distinguished ex-Ambassador Sir George Macartney, later celebrated for his pioneering mission to China, who had been recalled for siring a child with an imperial maid-of-honour, degraded himself by claiming that Catherine’s taste for Russian men was due to the fact that ‘Russian nurses it is said make a constant practice of pulling it when the child is young which has the great effect of lengthening the virile instrument’.³⁶ The diplomats sniggered in their despatches about ‘functions’ and ‘duties’ and coined puns that would shame a modern tabloid newspaper, but they were usually misinformed and historians have simply repeated the lies that seem to confirm every male fantasy about the sexual voracity of powerful women. There are few subjects in history that have been so wilfully misunderstood.

The nature of ‘favouritism’ derived from the Empress’s peculiar position and her unique relationship with Potemkin. It was undeniably true that anyone becoming a favourite of Catherine’s was entering a relationship in which there were three, not two, participants. Favouritism was necessary because Catherine lived in a man’s world. She could not publicly marry again and, whether in law or spirit, she already had a husband in Potemkin. Their egos, talents and emotions were too equal and too similar for them to live together, but Catherine needed constant loving and companionship. She yearned to have an effective family around her and she had strong maternal instincts to teach and nurture. These emotional longings were easily as strong as her famed sexual appetites. She was one of those who must have a companion, and often did not change partners without finding a new one first. Usually such habits are more based on insecurity than wantonness, but perhaps the two are linked. There was another reason why Catherine, as she got older, sought younger lovers, even at the cost of her dignity and reputation. She touched on it herself when she described the temptations of Elisabeth’s Court. The Court was filled with handsome men; she was the Sovereign. Catherine did it because she could – like the proverbial child in the candyshop. Who would not?

The position of Catherine’s favourite evolved into an unusual official appointment. ‘Loving the Empress of Russia’, explained the Prince de Ligne, the ultimate charmer of the Enlightenment who adored Potemkin and Catherine, ‘is a function of the Court.’³⁷ Instead of having a disorderly court, Catherine appointed her lover publicly. She hoped her system of favouritism would pull the sting of sleaziness. In a sense, she was applying the tenets of the Enlightenment to her loins, for surely clarity and reason would prevent superstition in the form of innuendo and gossip.

Appearances had to be maintained but this was an age of sexual frankness. Even the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa, the ultimate Catholic moralist, who presided over a court of stifling rectitude, gave Marie-Antoinette astonishingly frank gynaecological advice on her marriage to Louis XVI. Catherine herself was prudish in public. She reprimanded the Comte de Ségur for making risqué jokes, though she could make the odd one herself. When she was inspecting a pottery, Corberon recounted that she made such a shocking joke that he recorded it in code in his original diary: it sounds as if she chuckled that one of the shapes resembled a vagina. Later, her secretary recorded her laughing at how, in mythology, women could blame their pregnancies on visits from gods. In a lifetime in the public gaze, a couple of dirty jokes is not much – though one cannot imagine Maria Theresa making any.

Behind the façade, Catherine enjoyed a discreet earthiness with her lovers. Her letters to Potemkin and Zavadovsky displayed her animal sensuality such as when she said her body had taken over from her mind and she had to restrain every hair. She obviously enjoyed sex, but, as far as we know, it was always sex while she believed herself to be in love. There is no evidence at all for her ever having sex with a man for its own sake without believing it to be the start of a long relationship. The diplomats bandied names around and said they performed certain ‘functions’, which has been believed ever since.

However, there must have been transitory relationships and ‘one-night stands’ in the quest for compatibility, but they would have been rare because they were difficult to arrange. In the Winter Palace for example, it would have been surprisingly complicated to let in – and let out – a lover, even if he was a Guardsman, without other Guards, maids, valets and courtiers knowing about it. For example, when Catherine went to see Potemkin in 1774, she could not go into his rooms because he was with adjutants, who would be shocked to see the Empress appearing in his apartment: she had to return secretly to her rooms even though he was her official favourite. Later, when one favourite spent the night in her boudoir, he came out in the morning and met her secretary, and he recorded it in his diary.

Catherine spent her whole life in public in a way that makes even our own age of paparazzi seem private. Inside her Palace, every move she made was watched and commented upon. It is likely there would be much more evidence if there were regiments of Guardsmen being smuggled in and out of her apartments. Only Potemkin himself could wander into her bedroom whenever he liked because he had a covered passageway that led directly from his rooms to hers, and everyone accepted he was unique.³⁸

—

This is how the favourites rose to the imperial bedchamber and how they lived when they got there. Catherine’s love affair became a Court institution on the day that it was announced in the Court Journal that the young man in question, usually a Guardsman of provincial gentry and therefore not a magnate’s scion, had been appointed adjutant-general to the Empress. In several cases, as we have seen, the gentlemen were already aides-de-camp to Potemkin, an appointment that brought them into regular contact with Catherine.³⁹ So, whenever the diplomats wrote feverishly that Potemkin had presented an officer to Catherine, it could mean everything or nothing.^*3 However, one senses Catherine preferred choosing her lovers from among Potemkin’s staff, because they were somehow touched by a whiff of the Prince himself and they knew the form.

Before the appointment to adjutantcy, the young man would have jumped through several hoops. The legend claims that Potemkin simply selected the boy out of a list of candidates. Then if Catherine liked him, the ‘éprouveuse’ or sampler – her lady-in-waiting, first Countess Bruce and later Anna Protasova – would try him out. Saint-Jean, a dubious memoirist who apparently worked in Potemkin’s chancellery, claimed the Prince became a sort of sex therapist: a prospective favourite stayed with Potemkin for six weeks to be ‘taught all he needed to know’ as Catherine’s lover.⁴⁰ He would then be checked by Dr Rogerson, Catherine’s sociable Scottish doctor, and finally be sent to the Empress’s room for the most important test of all. Almost all of this legend, particularly Potemkin’s role, is false.

How were they selected? By chance, taste and artifice. Potemkin’s pimping was widely believed: ‘he now plays the same role that La Pompadour did at the end of her life with Louis XV’, claimed Corberon. The truth was far more complicated because it involved the love, choice and emotions of an extremely dignified and shrewd woman. Neither Potemkin nor anyone else could actually ‘supply’ men to Catherine. Both of them were too proud to play the procuring game. He did not ‘supply’ Zavadovsky, who already worked with Catherine. As her consort and friend, he ultimately sanctioned it, though not before trying to get rid of the dull secretary. It was said that Zorich was ‘appointed’ by Potemkin. Earlier on the day of his dinner party at Ozerki just before Zorich became favourite, a written exchange between Catherine and the Prince holds a clue.

Potemkin wrote to his Empress humbly asking her to appoint Zorich as his aide-de-camp, ‘granting him whatever rank Your Imperial Majesty thinks as necessary’. Potemkin was testing to see if Catherine approved Zorich or not. She simply wrote, ‘Promote to Colonel.’⁴¹ Potemkin wanted Catherine to be happy and to preserve his power. Perhaps this indirect route, not the smutty innuendo of the diplomats, was the subtle way that Potemkin tested the waters, asking if Catherine wanted this young man around Court or not, but without demeaning her dignity. Once she had found her favourite, she often looked to Potemkin for what she called his ‘clever guidance’.⁴² This was how these two highly sophisticated politicians and sensitive people communicated in such matters.

She made her own choices: when Lanskoy was chosen, he was one of Potemkin’s aides-de-camp, but the Prince actually wanted someone else to be favourite. However it worked out, there was much competition, among Panins and Orlovs, to introduce potential favourites to Catherine since they were regarded as having much more influence than they probably did. Rumiantsev and Panin both hoped to benefit from Potemkin’s rise: he was the downfall of both of them.

Were the favourites sampled by the ‘éprouveuse’? There is no evidence at all of any ‘trying out’, but there is plenty of Catherine’s jealous possessiveness of her favourites. This myth was based on Countess Bruce’s possible earlier relationship with Potemkin, her mission to summon him to the Empress’s favour from the Nevsky Monastery, and her affair with Korsakov well after Catherine’s relationship with him had started. Did Korsakov, boasting after his dismissal, invent this arrangement, perhaps to excuse his own behaviour? As for the medical check, there is no proof of it, but it would seem sensible to have a rollicking Guardsman checked by Dr Rogerson for the pox before sleeping with the Empress.

After this, the lucky man would dine with the Empress, attend whatever receptions she was gracing and then adjourn to the Little Hermitage to play cards with her inner circle – Potemkin, Master of the Horse Lev Naryshkin, assorted Orlovs, if they were in favour, a handful of Potemkin’s nieces and nephews, and the odd favoured foreigner. She sat for some rubbers of whist or faro or played rhyming games or charades. Everyone would be watching – though Potemkin would probably already know. At 11 p.m., Catherine rose and the young man accompanied her to her apartments. This would be the routine of their life virtually every day they were in Petersburg, unless there was a special holiday. Catherine was always grateful to Potemkin for his advice, kindness and generous lack of jealousy in such private matters – as she wrote to him after falling in love with Korsakov: ‘He’s an angel – big, big, big thanks!’⁴³

—

The favourite derived massive benefits from his gilded position, but these were balanced by dire disadvantages. The advantages were enough land, serfs, jewels and cash to found an aristocratic dynasty. The disadvantages were, simply put, Catherine and Potemkin.

The first advantage – and the real mark of the position – was possession of the most potent piece of real estate in all the Russians. As in all property, location was paramount. Apartments in the Empress’s wing of her palaces were as valuable as those at Versailles. The new favourite would take possession of the beautifully decorated, green-carpeted apartment linked to Catherine’s by the notorious staircase. There, it was claimed, he would find a certain sum of money as a welcoming present – 100,000 roubles or 10,000 roubles every week. But there is no evidence for this golden hello, though we know from Vassilchikov’s ‘kept woman’ complaint that she regularly gave generous cash presents on birthdays, and she certainly paid for their fine clothes and granted them a monthly table allowance. Legend claims that, in gratitude for their privileged position, the favourites would then pay Potemkin a bribe-payment of around 100,000 roubles as if they had bought a tax farm – or as if they were renting his place. Even the unreliable Saint-Jean does not believe this story, which is saying something as he believes virtually everything else.⁴⁴ Since the favourite would later receive untold riches, he might well thank the person who had sponsored his arrival in the highest circles, as anyone might thank a patron – but it is unlikely a penniless provincial would have 100,000 roubles to pay Potemkin even if the system existed. The only evidence of this payment was that, when they were appointed, one later favourite gave Potemkin a teapot, and another thanked his patron with a gold watch. Usually, Potemkin received nothing.

The favourite and his family would become rich. ‘Believe me, my friend,’ said Corberon, ‘over here, this profession is a good one!’⁴⁵ Foreigners were dazzled by the costs of maintaining, and especially dismissing, the favourites. ‘Not less than a million roubles yearly, exclusive of the enormous pensions of Prince Orlov and Prince Potemkin,’ calculated Harris, who estimated that the Orlovs had received seventeen million roubles between 1762 and 1783.⁴⁶ The figures are impossible to verify, but Catherine was exceedingly generous even when she had been ill-treated, perhaps out of guilt or at least awareness that it was not an easy role. Maybe she hoped her magnanimity would demonstrate that she herself was not hurt. However, there was no shortage of ambitious young men eager for the position. Indeed, as the Empress was selecting a new lover, Potemkin’s adjutant (and cousin of his nieces) Lev Engelhardt noticed that, ‘during the church service for the court, lots of young men, who were even the slightest bit handsome, stood erect, hoping to regulate their destiny in such an easy way.’⁴⁷

The arrangement may sound cold and cynical but the relationship of Catherine and favourite could not have been more indulgent, loving and cosy. Indeed, Catherine was passionately enamoured with each one and bathed them in loving and controlling attention, spent hours talking to them and reading with them. The beginning of each affair was an explosion of her maternal love, Germanic sentimentality and admiration for their beauty. She raved about them to anyone who would listen and, because she was Empress, everyone had to. Even though most of them were too spoiled and stupid to govern, she loved each one as if the relationship would last until the day she died. When her relationships fell apart, she became desperate and depressed, and often little business was achieved for weeks.

The imperial routine became excruciatingly boring after a while – endless dinners, games of whist, and sexual duties with a woman who, for all her charm and majesty, was increasingly stout, tormented by indigestion and in her early fifties by 1780. Once the excitement of luxury and the proximity to power had worn off, this could not have been easy for a young man in his early twenties. Catherine’s affection sounds stifling, if not suffocating. If a favourite had the slightest ability and character, it must have been exceedingly difficult to accompany, day after day, an ageing empress who treated him like a cross between a pretty pupil and a ‘kept woman’. One favourite called it a tedious ‘prison’. The Court was malicious. Favourites felt as if they were living among a ‘pack of wolves in a forest’. But it was also inhabited by the richest and most fashionable noble girls, while the favourites had to spend their nights with a stout old lady. Thus the temptations to cuckold the Empress must have been almost irresistible.⁴⁸

—

Potemkin’s role in Catherine’s life made it worse. It must have been intolerable to learn that, not only were they expected to be the companion to a demanding older lady, but the real benefits of her love were bestowed on Potemkin, whom they were ordered to adore as much as she did. Most of the favourites – we have seen Vassilchikov’s comments – had to admit that, while they were spoilt and kept, Potemkin was always Catherine’s ‘master’, her husband. Catherine herself called him ‘Papa’ or ‘My lord’. There was no room for another Potemkin in the government of Russia.

Even if the favourite was in love with the Empress, as Zavadovsky and Lanskoy were, there was no guarantee of privacy from Potemkin, whose rooms were linked to hers by the covered walkway. He was the one man in Russia who did not have to be announced to the Empress. By the late 1770s, he was often away, which must have been a relief, but when he was in Petersburg or Tsarskoe Selo, he was continually bursting in on the Empress like a dishevelled whirlwind in his fur-lined dressing gowns, pink shawls and red bandannas. This would naturally ruin the favourite’s day – especially since he was unlikely to be able to equal the Prince’s wit or charisma. No wonder Zavadovsky was reduced to tears and hiding.⁴⁹ Catherine made sure that the favourites paid court to Potemkin, with the humiliating implication that he was the real man in the household. Each of them wrote Potemkin complimentary letters and Catherine ended most of her letters to him by passing on the favourite’s flattery and enclosing his little notes.

There is a strong sense that Catherine almost wanted the favourites to regard her and Potemkin as parents. Her own son Paul had been taken away from her and then become alienated from her, and she could not bring up Bobrinsky, so it was understandable that she treated the favourites, who were as young as her sons, as child substitutes. She claimed maternally that ‘I’m benefiting the state by educating this young man’,⁵⁰ as if she was a one-woman finishing-school for civil servants.

If she was mother, then her consort, Potemkin, was the father of this peculiar ‘family’. She often called her favourites ‘the child’ and they respectfully called Potemkin, clearly on Catherine’s urging, ‘Uncle’ or ‘Papa’. When Potemkin was ill, Lanskoy had to write, ‘This moment I have heard from Lady Mother that you, Father Prince Grigory Alexandrovich, are ill, which troubles us greatly. I wish you wholeheartedly to be better.’ When he did not call him Father, Lanskoy wrote, ‘Dear Uncle, thank you very much for the letter which I have received from you.’ Then Lanskoy, just like Catherine, added: ‘You can’t imagine how dull it is without you, Father, come as soon as possible.’ Later, when Potemkin was critically ill in the south, Lanskoy wrote to him that ‘our incomparable Sovereign Mother…cries without interruption’. Lanskoy might have resented this but his affectionate nature made him take to what was effectively a makeshift family. As we will see in the next chapter, its strange symmetry was completed by the addition of Potemkin’s nieces.

It was not one way. Serenissimus treated the favourites like his children too. When the prancing Zorich was dismissed, Potemkin generously wrote to King Stanislas-Augustus in Poland to make sure the fallen favourite received a decent welcome. The Prince explained to the King that this ‘unhappy business’ had made Zorich ‘lose for a time in this country the advantages he deserved for his martial qualities, services and conduct beyond reproach’. The Polish King took care of Zorich during his travels. ‘There is a pleasure in obliging you,’ he told Potemkin. We know from Lanskoy’s thank-you letters that the Prince sent him kind notes and oranges and supported the promotion of his family.⁵¹

The favourites suited Potemkin for the simplest of reasons: while they had to accompany Catherine through her dinners and make love to her at night, Potemkin had the power. It took years for courtiers and diplomats to realize that the favourites were potentially powerful but only if they could somehow remove Potemkin. The Empress’s ladies-in-waiting, doctors and secretaries all had influence, but favourites had marginally more because she loved them. However these ‘ephemeral subalterns’ had no real power, even in her old age, as long as Potemkin was alive. They were, Count von der Goertz told Frederick II, ‘chosen expressly to have neither talent nor the means to take…direct influence.’⁵²

To exercise power, a man requires the public prestige to make himself obeyed. The very openness of favouritism ensured that their public prestige was minimal. ‘The definitive way in which she proclaimed their position…was exactly what limited the amount of honour she bestowed upon them,’ observed the Comte de Damas, who knew Catherine and Potemkin well. ‘They overruled her daily in small matters but never took the lead in affairs of importance.’⁵³ Only Potemkin and, to a lesser extent, Orlov increased their prestige by being Catherine’s lovers. Usually, the rise of a new favourite was ‘an event of no importance to anybody but the parties concerned’, Harris explained to his Secretary of State, Viscount Weymouth. ‘They are…creatures of Potemkin’s choice and the alteration will only serve to increase his power and influence.’⁵⁴ So, if they survived, they were his men; if they were dismissed, he benefited from the crisis. That at least was the theory, but things were never so neat.

The legend says Potemkin could dismiss them when he wished. Provided Catherine was happy, Potemkin could get on and run his part of the Empire. He tried to have every favourite dismissed at one time or another. Yet Catherine only dismissed one favourite because Potemkin demanded it. Usually she was in love with them and rejected his grumbles. Serenissimus, who was neither rigid nor vindictive, would then happily coexist with them until another crisis blew up. He knew the sillier favourites thought they could overthrow him. This often ended in their departure.

The favourites usually accelerated their own fall, either through cuckolding the Empress like Korsakov, becoming deeply unhappy like Zavadovsky and Potemkin himself, or getting embroiled in clumsy intrigues against Potemkin, as Zorich did, which caused the Empress to tire of them. When Potemkin demanded their dismissal, which he did quite frequently, she probably told him to mind his own business and gave him another estate or admired the latest plans for his cities. At other times, she criticized him for not telling her when they were deceiving her, but he probably knew that she was so in love at the time, there was no point.

—

The Prince liked to boast that Catherine always needed him when things were not going well, politically or amorously. During crises of the boudoir, he was especially indispensable, as Harris reported to London during Catherine’s hiccup with Lanskoy in May 1781: ‘These revolutions are moments when the influence of my friend is without bounds and when nothing he asks, however extravagant, is refused.’⁵⁵ But it was undoubtedly more than that.

In times of crisis, such as her humiliation by Korsakov, he became her husband and lover again. ‘When all other resources fail him to achieve what he wants,’ the Austrian envoy, Count Louis Cobenzl, who was one of the few foreigners who really knew Catherine and Potemkin intimately, told his Emperor Joseph II, ‘he retakes for a few days the function of favourite.’⁵⁶ The letters between Empress and Prince suggest that their relationship was so informal and intimate that neither would have thought twice about spending the night together at any time throughout their lives. Hence some writers call him ‘favori-en-chef’ and the others just ‘sous-favoris’. No wonder the ‘sous-favoris’ failed to understand Potemkin’s role and tried to intrigue against him.

Potemkin and Catherine had settled their personal dilemma in this formal system, which was supposed to preserve their friendship, keep imperial love out of politics and reserve political power for Potemkin. Even though there was a system which worked better than most marriages, it was still flawed. No one, not even those two deft manipulators, could really control favouritism, that sensitive and convenient fusion of love and sex, greed and ambition.

Nonetheless, it was their cure for jealousy. While Catherine was truly happy at last with Lanskoy in 1780, she was equally unjealous about Potemkin’s scandalous antics. ‘This step has increased Potemkin’s power,’ Harris told Weymouth, ‘which nothing can destroy unless a report is true…’. The report? That Potemkin might ‘marry his favourite niece’.⁵⁷

Skip Notes

*1 Alexander I appointed him Russia’s first Minister of Education.

*2 The letters mentioning Cagliostro are usually dated to 1774 by V.S. Lopatin and others because of their obvious sensual passion for Potemkin. But Count Cagliostro emerged in London only in 1776/7, so they could not have discussed him in 1774. Cagliostro travelled through Europe in 1778, finding fame in Mittau through the patronage of the ducal family and Courland aristocracy before coming to Petersburg, where he met Potemkin: their relations are discussed in the next chapter. If her wish that, instead of ‘soupe à la glace’ – Vassilchikov – they had begun their love ‘a year and a half ago’ is translated as ‘a year and a half before’, the letter could date from 1779/80, when their reunion would have reminded Catherine of that wasted year and a half.

*3 Catherine’s handful of adjutants included her favourite of the moment and also the sons of magnates and several of Potemkin’s nephews. This was further complicated because in June 1776 Potemkin created the rank of aide-de-camp to the Empress whose duties (written out in his own hand and corrected by Catherine) were to aid the adjutants. The Prince of course had his own aides-de-camp, who often then joined Catherine’s staff.