Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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DUCHESSES, DIPLOMATS AND CHARLATANS

Or in a gilded carriage

By truly splendid tandem drawn

With hound, companion or a jester

Or some beauty – better yet –

Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

Your Lordship can conceive no idea of the height to which corruption is carried in this country.

Sir James Harris to Viscount Stormont, 13 December 1780

In the summer of 1777, the sumptuous yacht of Elisabeth, Duchess of Kingston, also Countess of Bristol, moored in St Petersburg. The Duchess was a raddled temptress, regarded in London as adulterous, bigamous and brazen. However, Petersburg was a long way away and the Russians were sometimes astonishingly slow at exposing mountebanks in their midst. Not many English duchesses visited Russia at a time when English fashions were sweeping Europe. So many English merchants purveyed their goods to the Russians that they inhabited the famous ‘English line’ in Petersburg. At the Russian Court, Potemkin was the leading Anglophile.

Already as cosmopolitan as a man could be who had only once left his country, Potemkin was preparing himself for statesmanship by carefully studying the language, customs and politics of Westerners and filling his own Court – the ‘basse-cour’ or ‘farmyard’ as Catherine dubbed it¹ – with the dubious foreigners Russia attracted. In the late 1770s, Russia became a fashionable extension to the Grand Tour undertaken by young British gentlemen, and Potemkin became one of its obligatory sights. The Duchess was its pioneer.

Kingston was greeted by the President of the Naval College, Ivan Chernyshev (brother of Zakhar Chernyshev, whom Kingston had charmed when he was Ambassador to London). He presented her to Catherine, the Grand Duke and, of course, the Prince. Even Catherine and Potemkin were slightly impressed by the fabulous wealth of this celebrated aristocrat aboard her floating pleasure dome, packed with England’s finest antiques, mechanical contraptions and priceless treasures.

The Duchess of Kingston was one of those specimens of eighteenth-century femininity who managed to take advantage of the male-dominated aristocracy through a career of seduction, marriage, deception, exhibitionism and theft. Elisabeth Chudleigh was born a lady in 1720 and, at twenty-four, secretly married Augustus Hervey, who placed a bed-curtain ring instead of diamond on her finger. Heir to the Earl of Bristol, he was the scion of a family as shrewd at amassing wealth as it was voracious in abusing pleasure. Chudleigh was one of the most pursued and promiscuous women of her time, becoming an early celebrity in the penny prints: she sought publicity and they followed her antics in over-excited detail. Her legitimate period reached a naked apogee when she appeared wild-haired in a see-through gauze dress at the Venetian Ambassador’s Ball in 1749, dressed as Iphigenia the Sacrifice – ‘so naked’, commented Mary Wortley Montagu, daughter of the first Duke of Kingston, ‘that the high priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim’. It was a sight of such voluptuous daring that she appeared smirking in a generation of best-selling prints. So wanton was this vision that she supposedly even managed the impressive feat of seducing old George II.

After years as the mistress of the Duke of Kingston, an ageing Whig magnate, she married him bigamously. When he died, there was an unholy fight for his fortune. His Pierrepont family uncovered her marriage to Hervey and brought her to trial before the House of Lords, where she was found guilty before 5,000 spectators. She would have been branded – but Hervey inherited his earldom just in time to give her immunity. She lost the duchy but got the lucre – and continued to call herself Duchess anyway. She escaped to Calais, pursued by outraged Pierreponts, and the ‘Ducal Countess’, as Horace Walpole dubbed her, fitted out her new yacht with a dining-hall, drawing-room, kitchen, picture gallery and organ, stealing what she liked from the Kingston mansion, Thoresby Hall. Her crew indulged in every imaginable shenanigan, including two mutinies, which meant the English sailors had to be replaced. Finally she set sail with a colourful entourage including a French crew, an English chaplain-cum-hack (who seemed to be an unofficial correspondent of the newspapers) and a set of caddish ne’er-do-wells.

On arrival in Russia, this circus caused something more familiar in the British Home Counties than the palaces of St Petersburg – a war of the vicars. Kingston held ‘a magnificent entertainment on board her yacht’ which was loyally recounted to Gentleman Magazine by her obsequious chaplain. ‘As soon as dinner was served a band of music composed of fifes, drums, clarinettes, and French horns played some English marches…After dinner, there were some concertos on the organ which is placed in the antechamber.’ The British community in Petersburg was scandalized by the impudence of this bigamous parvenu which, according to their chaplin William Took, excited ‘universal contempt’. But her ‘ostentatious displays’ went down well in Petersburg.

The Duchess and her entourage were given a house on the Neva by the Empress and began to spend much time with Potemkin. They actually fitted rather well into his dissolute ménage. Indeed Potemkin flirted with the deaf, over-rouged, over-painted Duchess, who still dressed like a young girl, but he was more interested in her antiques. One of his officers, Colonel Mikhail Garnovsky, ‘took care’ of her. Garnovsky was what might be called a tradesman–soldier: he was Potemkin’s spy, adviser and commercial agent and now added gigolo to his curriculum vitae. He became the lover of the Duchess, who had to spend ‘five or six hours at her toilette’ and was almost a definition of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. She gave Potemkin treasures and presented Ivan Chernyshev with a Raphael. She wanted to take Potemkin’s niece Tatiana, aged eight, home with her to give her a Kingstonian education, a contradiction that Serenissimus would not even contemplate.

Kingston, who was nine years older than Catherine, had planned to dazzle Petersburg and leave fast to the sound of trumpets. But this plan went amiss when, to the secret delight of observers like Corberon, the tempest of September 1777 ran her yacht aground. Then her French crew mutinied too and absconded, leaving the Empress to find a new crew and have the yacht repaired. By the time she departed by land, the Duchess was calling Catherine her ‘great friend’, and was enamoured of Potemkin, whom she called a ‘a great minister, full of esprit…in a word all that can make an honest and gallant man’. He and Catherine politely invited her back, though they were tiring of her. Garnovsky accompanied her to the border.

She returned two years later – like every bad penny, she took up any invitation, no matter how lightly offered. She ordered Potemkin a richly bound book with his titles in silver and diamonds, but typically it did not arrive. She decorated a ‘most splendid’ Petersburg mansion with, according to her former gardener at Thoresby, now working for the Empress, ‘crimsons damask hangings’ and ‘five Musical Lustres! Good organ, plate, paintings!’ She bought estates in Livonia, including one from Potemkin for over £100,000 sterling, according to Samuel Bentham, a young Englishman, and grandly called her lands ‘Chudleigh’.

By 1780, Catherine and Potemkin were bored of ‘Kingstonsha’ – that Kingston woman. Samuel Bentham spotted the bedraggled old slattern at the Razumovskys, sleeping through a concert: ‘She served the company to laugh at.’ However, she retained her modern expertise in what we now call public relations and leaked untrue tales of her imperial intimacy to the London newspapers. ‘The Empress is polite in public,’ Bentham noted, ‘but she had no private conferences [with Catherine], which…is what she herself put in the English Papers.’ She kept open house ‘but cannot prevail on any but Russian officers, who want a dinner, to come…’. She made a failed attempt to marry one of the Radziwills, visited ‘Chudleigh’, then left for Calais. She made her last visit in 1784. When she left finally in 1785, time had caught up with her. After her death in Paris in 1788, Garnovsky, who was left 50,000 roubles in her will, managed to commandeer most of the contents of ‘Chudleigh’ and three of her properties, on which he based his own fortune.²

The Prince’s aesthetic tastes were influenced by the Duchess – indeed he inherited her most valuable treasures.^*1 Potemkin’s Peacock Clock by James Cox, brought to Petersburg by her in 1788, was one of the most exquisite objects ever made: a gold lifesized peacock with resplendent tail fan standing on a gold tree with branches and leaves and an owl, in a gold cage twelve feet high with bells around it. The face of the clock was a mushroom with a dragonfly keeping the seconds. When the time struck the hour, this delightful contraption burst into surprising movement: the owl’s head nodded and the peacock crowed, cocked its head regally and then opened its tail to its glorious full extent.^*2 She also brought an organ-clock, another object of breathtaking beauty, probably the one that played on her yacht: on the outside, the broad face made it appear like a normal clock, but it opened to become an organ that played like a high-noted church instrument.^*3 When the Duchess died, the Prince bought these objets and ordered his mechanics to assemble them in his Palace.³

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The Duchess also left a more tawdry reminder of herself around Potemkin’s person. When she returned in 1779, still in favour, she brought a plausible young Englishman who claimed to be an army officer, expert in military and commercial affairs. ‘Major’ James George Semple had indeed served in the British army against the Americans and he certainly was a specialist in commerce, though not of the kind he suggested. (A portrait in the British Museum shows him sporting an insolent expression, high hat, ruffled white shirt and uniform – the paraphernalia of the mountebank.) When he arrived in Russia, Semple was already a celebrated rogue known as ‘the Northern Impostor and the Prince of Swindlers’. Indeed a few years later, a book was published about him: The Northern Hero – Surprising Adventures, Amorous Intrigues, Curious Devices, Unparalleled Hypocrisy, Remarkable Escapes, Infernal Frauds, Deep-Laid Projects and Villainous Exploits. Semple was married to a cousin of Kingston’s, but he was in the debtor’s jail at Calais when she was arranging her second Russian jaunt. She bought him out of the jail and invited him to travel with her to Petersburg. The jailbird probably seduced the Ducal Countess.⁴

Potemkin was immediately charmed. The Prince always relished swashbuckling heroes and Semple, like all rascals, lived on his blarney. In his early days as a statesman, when he was getting to know Westerners for the first time, Potemkin was certainly careless about his foreign friends, but he always preferred amusing hucksters to boring aristocrats. The Northern Hero and Prince of Swindlers joined the entertaining Anglo-French riffraff in the basse-cour, including an Irish soldier of fortune named Newton, who was later guillotined in the Revolution; the Chevalier de Vivarais, a defrocked French priest who was accompanied by his mistress,⁵ and a mysterious French adventurer called the Chevalier de la Teyssonière, who helped Corberon advance French interests.⁶ It is a shame that the era’s premier adventurer, the cultivated and witty Casanova, had arrived too early for Potemkin: they would have enjoyed each other.

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The international circus of the basse-cour was a grotesque microcosm of the cosmopolitan world of diplomacy. Serenissimus, while working seriously on military and southern affairs, now began to take an interest in Nikita Panin’s responsibility – foreign affairs. As Countess Rumiantseva had shrewdly observed to her husband after the end of Potemkin’s affair with Catherine, ‘The impulsiveness, which excited him once, is over. He leads an absolutely different life. Doesn’t play cards in the evenings; working all the time…You’ll never recognize him…’.⁷

The Prince was a diplomatic neophyte, but he was well qualified for the nature of international affairs at that time. The diplomatic world of the eighteenth century is often described as an elegant ballet in which every dancer knew their steps down to the minutest detail. But this was something of an illusion for, if the steps were familiar, the music, by late in the century, was no longer predictable. The ‘Old System’ had been overturned by the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of 1756. The guiding light of diplomacy was the ruthless self-interest of raison d’état. All depended on the power of the state, measured in population, territorial aggrandizement and size of army. The ‘balance of power’, maintained by the ever present threat of force, was really an argument for the relentless expansion of the Great Powers at the cost of lesser ones: it often meant that, if one Power made gains, the others had to be compensated for them, as Poland discovered in 1772.

Ambassadors were usually cultivated aristocrats, who, depending on distance from their capitals, possessed independence to pursue royal policy in their own way, but the initiatives of the diplomats could be recklessly out of kilter with government policy: treaties were sometimes signed by diplomats who were then disowned by their own ministries. This meant that policy developments were slow and ponderous as couriers dashed back and forth along muddy, potholed roads, dodging footpads and staying at the cockroach-infested, rat-teeming taverns. Diplomats liked to give the impression of being aristocratic amateurs. It was quite common for example for the British and French ambassadors to Paris and London to swap houses and servants until their missions were over. The Foreign Offices of the eighteenth century were tiny: the British Foreign Office in the 1780s, for example, boasted a mere twenty employees.

Diplomacy was regarded as the prerogative of the king. Sometimes monarchs pursued clandestine policies that were completely contrary to those of their own ministers: in this way, Louis XV’s blundering anti-Russian Polish policy, known as ‘le Secret’, managed to waste the last vestiges of French influence in Warsaw. Ambassadors and soldiers served kings, not countries. As Potemkin’s basse-cour and military entourage were to demonstrate, this was an age of cosmopolitanism when foreigners could find service in any court, especially in diplomacy and the army. Contemporaries would have regarded our view that a man can only serve the country in which he was born as silly and limiting.

‘I like to be a foreigner everywhere,’ the Prince de Ligne, international grand seigneur, told his French mistress, ‘as long as I have you and own some property somewhere.’ Ligne explained that ‘one loses respect in a country if one spends too much time there’.⁸ Embassies and armies were filled with various nationalities who excelled in those services: Livonian barons, Italian marcheses, German counts and, the most ubiquitous of all, Jacobite Scotsmen and Irishmen. Italians specialized in diplomacy, while the Scots and the Irish excelled at war.

After the Fifteen and the Forty-Five Rebellions, many Celtic families found themselves spread across different countries: they were known as the ‘Flying Geese’ and many came to service in Russia.^*4 Three families of ‘Flying Geese’ – the Laceys, Brownes and Keiths^*5 – seem to have dominated the armies of Europe. The Keith brothers – George, the exiled Earl Marshal of Scotland, and his brother James – became Frederick the Great’s intimate friends after they had served Russia against the Turks. When General James Keith saluted an Ottoman envoy during those wars, he was amazed to hear a broad Scottish reply from beneath the turban of the Turk – a renegade Caledonian, from Kirkcaldy.⁹ At a typical battle such as Zorndorf in the Seven Years War, the commanders of the Russians, Prussians and nearby Swedes were called Fermor, Keith and Hamilton.

Beneath the turgid etiquette, the competition between the ambassadors was an unscrupulous tournament to influence policy and gather information, starring adventurers of ersatz aristocracy, pickpocketing actresses, code-breakers, galloping couriers, letter-opening postmasters, maids, temptresses and noblewomen paid by foreign governments. Most despatches were intercepted by the Cabinet Noir, a secret government bureau that opened, copied and resealed letters, then broke their cyphers. The Russian Cabinet Noir was particularly effective.^*6 Kings and diplomats took advantage of this system by not using code when they were writing something they wished a foreign government to know – this was called writing ‘en clair’.¹⁰

Rival ambassadors employed an expensive network of spies, especially domestic servants, and they spent a fortune on paying ‘pensions’ to ministers and courtiers. Secret service funds were used either to secure information (hence English gifts to Alexandra Engelhardt) or to influence policy (Catherine herself received English loans during the 1750s). These latter payments often had no effect at all on policy and generally the scale of bribery was vastly exaggerated.¹¹ Russia was reputed to be especially venal but it was probably no more so than France or England. In Russia, the main bidders for influence were England, France, Prussia and Austria. All were now to use every weapon in their arsenal to court the favour of Potemkin.

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Europe faced three sources of conflict in 1778. France, eager to avenge the Seven Years War, was about to support the American rebels and go to war against England. (The war started in June 1778 and Spain joined the French side the next year.) However, Russia was much more concerned with the other two flashpoints. The Ottoman Sultan had never been reconciled to the terms of the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, especially the independence of the Crimea and the opening of the Black and Mediterranean Seas to Russian merchant ships. In November 1776, Catherine and Potemkin had to send an army to the Crimea to impose a khan of their choice, Shagin Giray, in the face of disturbances inspired by Constantinople. Now the Khanate was rebelling against Russia’s protégé, and the Ottoman and Russian Empires moved closer to war.

The third axis of conflict was the rivalry for the mastery of Germany between Prussia and Austria. Russia always had a choice between alliance with Austria or Prussia: each had its own advantages. Russia had been allied with Austria from 1726, and it was only thanks to Peter III that it had switched to the Prussian option in 1762. Austria had not forgiven Russia for this betrayal, so Catherine and Frederick were stuck with each other. Foreign Minister Nikita Panin had staked his career on maintaining this alliance, but the Northern System – his network of northern powers including Britain – had never materialized beyond its Prussian fulcrum. Furthermore, it had given Frederick an influence over Russian policy in Poland and the Ottoman Empire that almost amounted to a veto.

However, Potemkin always believed that Russia’s interests – and his own – lay southwards, not northwards. He cared about the Austrian–Prussian and Anglo-French conflicts only in so far as they affected Russia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire around the Black Sea. The victories in the Russo-Turkish War had exposed the irrelevance of the Prussian alliance along with Frederick’s duplicity.

Serenissimus began to study diplomacy. ‘How courteous he is with everyone. He pretends to be jolly and chatty but it’s clear that he is only dissembling. Nothing he wants or asks for will be refused.’ In 1773–4, Potemkin had paid court ‘most assiduously’ to Nikita Panin.¹² The Minister was a dyspeptic monument to the slowness and obstinacy of Russian bureaucracy – piggy-eyed, amused and shrewd, he squatted astride Russian foreign policy like a swollen, somnolent toad. The diplomats regarded Panin as ‘a great glutton, a great gamester and a great sleeper’, who once left a despatch, unopened, in his robe de chambre for four months. He ‘passes his life with women and courtesans of the second order’ with ‘all the tastes and whims of an effeminate young man’. In reply to the Swedish Ambassador’s brave attempt to discuss affairs of state during a meal, he delivered the bon mot: ‘It is evident, my dear Baron, that you are not accustomed to affairs of state if you let them interfere with dinner.’ There was not a little admiration in Harris’s tone when he told his Court that ‘you will not credit me if I tell you that out of 24 hours, Count Panin only gives half an hour to the discharge of his duties’.¹³

Initially, Potemkin ‘thought only of establishing his favour well and did not occupy himself with foreign affairs in the direction of which Panin showed a predilection for the King of the Prussia’, noted the Polish King Stanislas-Augustus. Now he began to flex his muscles. Early in his friendship with Catherine, it is likely that Potemkin persuaded her that Russia’s interests were to maintain Peter the Great’s conquests on the Baltic and keep control of Poland, but then use an Austrian alliance to make the Black Sea a Russian lake. Catherine had never liked Frederick the Great nor trusted Panin, but Potemkin was suggesting a reversal of Russian policy in turning to Austria. This had to be done slowly – but tensions with Panin began to grow. When the Council sat one day, Potemkin reported that there was news of disturbances in Persia and suggested there might be benefits for Russia. Panin, fixated on Russia’s northern interests, attacked him bitterly, and an angry Potemkin broke up the meeting.¹⁴ The rivalry between the two statesmen and their two policies became more obvious.

Panin was not going to give up without a fight, and Catherine had to move cautiously because Potemkin was as yet unproven on the international stage. Panin grew nervous as it became clear that Potemkin was there to stay. In June 1777, Corberon wrote that Panin had even said to a crony: ‘Wait. Things can’t stay like this for ever.’ But nothing came of it as Potemkin consolidated his power. Catherine was deliberately pushing Potemkin forward on foreign policy: she had asked him to discuss affairs with the visiting Prince Henry of Prussia. When Gustavus III of Sweden, who had recently retaken absolute power in a coup, arrived on an incognito visit calling himself Count of Gothland, Potemkin met him and accompanied him during his stay. Potemkin’s challenge was to destroy Panin’s power, overturn the Northern System and arrange an alliance that would let him pursue his dreams in the south.

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The two eastern conflicts of Europe escalated simultaneously at the beginning of 1778 – in ways that made the Prussian alliance still more obsolete and freed Potemkin’s hand to begin building in the south. In both cases, Catherine and Potemkin co-ordinated diplomatic and military action.

The first was the so-called ‘Potato War’. The Elector of Bavaria died in December 1777. Emperor Joseph II, whose influence was growing as his mother Maria Theresa aged, had long schemed to swap the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, which would increase his power in Germany and compensate for Austria’s loss of Silesia to Prussia. In January 1778, Austria occupied most of Bavaria. This threatened Prussia’s new Great Power status in the Holy Roman Empire, so Frederick, now aged sixty-five, rallied the German princes, threatened by Austrian aggrandizement, and in July invaded Habsburg Bohemia. Austria’s ally France was busy fighting Britain and would not support Joseph. Catherine was cool about aiding her Prussian ally too. Joseph marched towards Frederick. Central Europe was at war again. But neither side dared risk a pitched battle. There was skirmishing. The men spent a cold winter digging up paltry Bohemian potatoes, the only things left to eat – hence the ‘Potato War’.

Meanwhile in the Crimea, now ‘independent’ of Istanbul after Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, the pro-Russian Khan Shagin Giray was overthrown by his own subjects. Potemkin ordered his troops in the Crimea to restore Shagin Giray. The Turks, who had even sent an abortive expedition in August 1777 to overthrow the Khan, needed a Western ally to support them against Russia, but Austria and Prussia were busy harvesting Bohemian potatoes and France was about to join the Americans in their War of Independence.

Potemkin and Panin, secretly emerging as leaders of pro-Austrian and pro-Prussian factions, agreed with Catherine that Russia, though obliged by treaty to aid its ally Prussia, did not want a German war, which would weaken its position in the Crimea. France also did not wish these flashpoints to lead to war. Its sole aim was to prevent Britain finding a Continental ally. Thus, instead of encouraging war, France worked to reconcile the differences in both disputes. Russia offered to co-mediate with France between Prussia and Austria. In return for Catherine not helping Prussia, France agreed to mediate between Russia and the Turks.

The mediators compelled Austria to back down. Catherine and Potemkin worked together while bickering about their own relationship, her favourites and his nieces. ‘Batinka,’ she wrote to the Prince, ‘I’ll be glad to receive the plan of operations from your hands…I’m angry with you, sir, why do you speak to me in parables?’¹⁵ Potemkin ordered a corps under Prince Repnin to march west to help Prussia. Both sides were supposed to have offered Potemkin vast bribes. The Austrian Chancellor Kaunitz offered ‘a considerable sum’, Frederick the Duchy of Courland. ‘Had I accepted the duchy of Courland it would not have been difficult for me to obtain the crown of Poland since the Empress might have induced the king to abdicate in my favour,’ Potemkin supposedly claimed later.¹⁶ In fact, there is no proof any money was offered or taken, especially since Frederick’s meanness was legendary.^*7

Peace was settled at Teschen on 2/13 May 1779 with Russia as guarantor of the status quo in the Holy Roman Empire. Russia and Turkey had come to an agreement in March at the convention of Ainalikawak, which recognized the independence of the Crimea with Shagin Giray as khan. Both these successes raised Catherine’s confidence and prestige in Europe.

Serenissimus welcomed Prince Henry of Prussia back to Petersburg in 1778 to shore up the tottering Prussian alliance. The Hohenzollern did his best to cultivate Potemkin, flattering him that he ranked in a triumvirate with the two senior imperial figures. Henry was touched ‘by the marks of the Empress’s goodwill, the Grand Duke’s friendship and the attention of you, my Prince’.¹⁷ Henry knew Potemkin well by then. But one wonders if he was amused when Potemkin unleashed his pet monkey during discussions with the Empress, who started playing with it. Catherine revelled in the Hohenzollern’s astonishment. But whether Prince Henry realized it or not, these simian tricks were a sign that Potemkin was no longer interested in the Prussian alliance. Serenissimus sought any means to undermine Panin and advance his new strategy.

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On 15 December 1777, Potemkin found his unwitting tool in this struggle. Sir James Harris arrived in Petersburg as the new minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary of the Court of St James’s. Harris was a very different species of Anglo-Saxon from Potemkin’s friends Semple and Kingston. He was a fine advertisement for the suave and cultured English gentleman. Now aged thirty-two, he had made his reputation in a most eighteenth-century manner while on his first posting to Madrid. When Spain and Britain almost went to war over some obscure islands called the Falklands, he should have returned home but instead he lingered twenty miles outside Madrid conducting a love affair. He was therefore uncannily well placed to react quickly and adeptly when the war did not occur. His career was made.¹⁸

Britain was fighting the Americans, backed by France, in their War of Independence, so Harris’s instructions from the Secretary of State for the North, the Earl of Suffolk, were to negotiate an ‘Offensive and Defensive Alliance’ with Russia, which was to provide naval reinforcements. Harris first applied to Panin, who was not inclined to help. Learning of Potemkin’s ‘inveterate hatred for Monsieur de Panin’,¹⁹ he decided to cultivate Serenissimus.

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On 28 June 1779, Sir James screwed up his courage and approached the Prince in the Empress’s antechamber with the cheek and flattery most likely to win his attention. ‘I told him the moment was now come when Russia must act the greatest part in Europe – and he alone was adequate to direct the conduct of it.’ Harris had noticed Potemkin’s rising interest in international relations and admired his ‘very acute understanding and boundless ambition’. This was the beginning of a close friendship that confirmed Potemkin’s Anglophilia²⁰ – but never his real commitment to an English alliance.

Sir James Harris (like his French counterparts) presumed throughout his Russian mission that Potemkin’s and Catherine’s prime interest was the Anglo-French struggle, not Russia’s Turkish conflict. Potemkin took advantage of the deluded Anglocentricity of a Whig gentleman in the last days of Britain’s first world empire. So these two scenes – the rivalry of Western diplomats and the secret dreams of Potemkin and Catherine – were played out simultaneously, side by side. The only things Potemkin really had in common with Harris were love of England and hostility towards Panin.

Serenissimus was delighted by Harris’s feelers and liked the Englishman, for he impulsively invited him to dinner in his family circle at a nephew’s country house. Initially, the Englishman denounced the depravity of Catherine and the ‘dissipation’ of Potemkin, but now he almost fell in love with the exuberance of the man he proudly called ‘my friend’.²¹ Harris begged Potemkin to send ‘an armament’, a naval expedition to help Britain, in return for some yet undecided benefit, to restore the balance of power and raise Russia’s influence. The Prince seemed struck with this idea and said, ‘Whom shall we trust to draw up this declaration and to whom for preparing the armament? Count Panin has neither the will nor the capacity…he is a Prussian and nothing else; Count Chernyshev [Navy Minister] is a villain and would betray any orders given him…’.²²

Potemkin was also being wooed by Corberon and the new Prussian envoy, Goertz, both of whom described his extravagance, fun and whimsy. But the Prussian was particularly impressed by a man ‘so superior by his genius…that everyone collapses before him’. Harris won this contest: Serenissimus agreed to arrange a private audience with the Empress so that the Englishman could put his case directly.²³

On 22 July 1779, Korsakov, the favourite of the day, approached Harris after Catherine had finished her card game at a masquerade and led him through the back way into the Empress’s private dressing-room. Harris proposed his alliance to the Empress, who was friendly but vague. She saw that Harris’s ‘Armament’ would embroil Russia in the Anglo-French war. Harris asked Catherine if she would give independence to America. ‘I’d rather lose my head,’ she replied vehemently. The next day, Harris delivered a memorandum, putting his case, to Potemkin.²⁴

Potemkin’s rivalry with Panin, seemed to work to Harris’s advantage – yet it should have made him cautious. When the Council met to discuss the British proposals, Catherine through the Prince asked Harris to produce another memorandum. When they talked about Panin’s conduct, Potemkin bamboozled the Englishman by claiming that ‘he had been so little conversant in foreign affairs that a great deal of what I said was entirely new to him’. But there was no quicker student than Potemkin.

The Prince and Sir James spent their days and nights chatting, drinking, plotting and gambling. Potemkin may have been playing Harris like a game of poker, but he was also truly fond of him. One has the distinct sense that, while Harris was talking business, Potemkin was taking a course in English civilization. Couriers rushed between the two. Harris’s published letters give his official account of the friendship, but his unpublished letters to Potemkin in the Russian archives show the extent of their familiarity: one is about a wardrobe that one of Harris’s debtors gave him instead of the 1,500 guineas he was owed. ‘You’d give me incontestable proof of your friendship’, wrote the Envoy Extraordinary, ‘if you could get the Empress to buy it…Forgive me for talking to you so frankly…’. It is not recorded if Potemkin arranged this, but he was a generous friend. In May 1780, Harris sent his father, a respected Classical scholar, a ‘packet of Greek productions given to me for you by Prince Potemkin’. When Harris’s father died, Potemkin was assiduous in his sympathy. In an undated note, the envoy thanked him: ‘I’m not yet in a state to come round to your place my Prince but the part you’ve been kind enough to play in my sadness has softened it infinitely…No one could love you, esteem you, respect you more than I.’²⁵

When they met in the Winter Palace, Potemkin pulled Harris into the Empress’s private apartments as if they were his own and the two chatted there all evening.²⁶ They obviously caroused together. ‘I gave a soupe dansant about three weeks ago to Prince Potemkin and his set,’ Harris told his sister Gertrude in 1780, at which they drank ‘three bottles of the King of Poland’s tokay and a dozen of claret and champagne’. Harris claimed he drank only water.

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This Anglo-Russian friendship intensified the diplomatic intrigue in Petersburg as the other diplomats frantically watched, eavesdropped and bribed to discover what they were talking about. The surveillance and espionage was so obvious it must have been comical, and we can almost hear the rustle of curtains and the flicker of eyes at keyholes. The French were most alarmed. Corberon was reduced to spying constantly on Potemkin’s various houses: he noted down that Harris had a tent in his garden ‘seating ten’ that he claimed was a gift from Potemkin. Catherine’s doctor, Rogerson, was definitely ‘Harris’s spy’, Corberon even called on Potemkin to accuse him of enmity towards France. He then ‘took from his pocket a paper from which he read a list of the several times’ Harris had been seen socializing with Potemkin. The Prince abruptly ended this otiose conversation by saying he was busy. Harris probably heard about this encounter from his spy, the Prince’s omnipresent niece–mistress, Alexandra. The Englishman became so close to her that Corberon accused him of courting. The Prussians were also watching. ‘For a month, the table and house of the British Ambassador are filled with the relations and creatures of the favourite,’ Goertz told Frederick on 21 September 1779.²⁷

This elegant skulduggery reached a new low when Harris delivered his second memorandum to Potemkin, who was said to have languidly placed it in his dressing-gown pocket or ‘under his pillow’. Somehow, it was removed and given to the French chargé, Corberon, and thence to Panin. The Chevalier de la Teyssonière, basse-cour hanger-on, played some part, but it was another Frenchwoman, a mistress of the Prince and a governess of his nieces, Mademoiselle Guibald, who actually stole the document. It was later claimed that Panin then added notes contradicting the British arguments and left it on Catherine’s desk so that she would believe the notes were Potemkin’s advice. This is obviously designed to give Potemkin’s house a disorderly air, hence most historians have dismissed it, and Guibald, as legends. Catherine would certainly have known Potemkin’s handwriting and views, making the notes an unlikely detail. But Teyssonière was certainly skulking around Potemkin’s Court and Tatania Engelhardt’s letters to her uncle reveal that Miss Guibald did exist. Besides, virtually every member of Potemkin’s household would have been receiving bribes from somebody, which is probably why Guibald was not dismissed. She remained in Potemkin’s household for years after. The story may have some truth after all.²⁸

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Serenissimus did not spend all his time with Harris. In the midst of this intrigue, a European phenomenon arrived in Petersburg. The soi-disant Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, accompanied by a pretty wife and posing as a Spanish colonel, set up shop as a healer, purveyor of the Egyptian Masonic rite, alchemist, magus and necromancer. The famous charlatan’s real name was probably Giuseppe Balsamo of Sicily, but this squat, swarthy and balding Sicilian with black eyes and a throbbing forehead clearly possessed plenty of chutzpah and charisma.

The Age of Reason had undermined Religion, but there was a natural yearning for spirituality to fill the void. This was one reason for the fashion for Freemasonry, manifested in both rationalist and occult varieties. The latter spread rapidly in all its esoteric diversity – hypnotism, necromancy, alchemy, Kabbalism, preached in cults such as Martinism, Illuminism, Rosicrucianism and Swedenborgism. These ideas were propagated through Masonic lodges and by a remarkable series of healers and charlatans. Some like Swedenborg, Mesmer and Lavater were magi whose knowledge of human nature, if not healing powers, helped people in an era when doctors and scientists could explain little.²⁹ Many were just charlatans like the lover Casanova and the notorious George Psalmanazar, travelling Europe deceiving innocent noblemen with their tales of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Fountain of Youth. They always presented themselves as exotically titled men of wealth, taste and mystery. Each offered an enticing mixture of common sense, practical medical advice, promises of eternal youth, guides to the after-life – and the ability to convert base metals, and even urine, into gold.

Their doyen, the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain, who claimed to be almost two thousand years old and to have witnessed the Crucifixion in his youth (his valet remembered it too), impressed Louis XV by creating, out of ether, a diamond worth 10,000 livres. A substantial chunk of Europe’s aristocracy at this time was somehow involved in these cults of Freemasonry.

Cagliostro had dazzled Mittau, capital of Courland, but he then had to leave swiftly. Now he hoped to reproduce his success in Petersburg. As Catherine told Grimm, the hierophant ‘came at a good moment for him when several Masonic lodges wanted to see spirits…’. The ‘master sorcerer’ duly provided as many as required, along with all sorts of tricks involving disappearing money, sales of mysterious potions and ‘chemical operations that don’t work’. She especially laughed at his claim to be able to create gold out of urine and offer eternal life.

Nonetheless Cagliostro conducted healings and won a distinguished following for his Egyptian Masonic rite. Corberon and courtiers like Ivan Yelagin and Count Alexander Stroganov ardently subscribed to the necromancer’s powers. Many Russian nobles joined Masonic lodges. Some gradually evolved into something like an anti-Catherinian opposition, which explained her deep suspicion of Freemasonry.

Potemkin attended some of Cagliostro’s seances but never believed in them, remaining one of the few senior courtiers who did not become a Mason. He and Catherine thoroughly enjoyed joking about Cagliostro’s tricks.³⁰ Potemkin’s real interest was in Countess Cagliostro. Serenissimus is said to have enjoyed an affair with the hierophant’s wife, born Lorenza, renamed Serafina and sometimes calling herself Princess di Santa Croce. This may have damaged Cagliostro more than he realized. Catherine teased Potemkin about the time he spent at their house: perhaps he should learn to keep Cagliostro’s spirits in check…Did she mean the ersatz Princess–Countess?³¹

So often did he call on Cagliostro’s luxurious, indebted establishment that, according to legend, one of Potemkin’s highborn Russian mistresses decided to bribe the adventuress to give him up. In one of those poignant, almost respectful meetings between noblewoman and courtesan, the former paid Serafina 30,000 roubles, quite a sum, to leave. Potemkin was flattered. He told Cagliostro’s girl that she could stay, let her keep the money – and paid back the full amount to the noblewoman. Some silly legends³² claim that the ‘noblewoman’ was the Empress herself.

Debts and truth had a way of catching up with such characters, even in that louche century. Soon afterwards, the Spanish Ambassador complained that Cagliostro was neither grandee of Spain nor colonel. Catherine cheerfully told Grimm that the sorcerer and his ‘Countess’ had been thrown out of Russia.^*8

—

When Panin summoned Harris in early February 1780 to read him a rejection of the British proposals for an alliance, Sir James rushed over to Potemkin to learn the reasons. Potemkin clearly (for once) stated that Catherine’s fear of ‘embarking on a fresh war was stronger even than her thirst for glory’. Harris did not seem to hear. Potemkin explained that the new favourite, Lanskoy, was desperately ill, which had ‘unhinged’ the Empress. Sir James believed him when he claimed: ‘My influence is temporarily suspended.’ Harris criticized these ‘timid resolutions’, at which ‘The Prince caught fire’ and boasted that before he slept he ‘would have a trial of skill whether there was in the empire any influence more powerful than his’. Harris was most encouraged, but typically Potemkin became ill and did not receive him again for weeks.

Serenissimus then confided in the credulous Englishman that the Empress was an over-cautious woman capable of feminine hysteria about her mignons. Potemkin himself alternated between expressions of political impotence and explosions of bombast. He attacked Panin, that ‘indolent and torpid minister’ – while himself lying in bed in the middle of the day. Harris was almost bewitched by Potemkin’s friendship, flamboyance and apparent honesty.³³

In February 1780, Serenissimus summoned Harris to announce, ‘with an impetuous joy analogous to his character’, the despatch of an armament of fifteen ships-of-the-line and five frigates ‘to protect Russian trade’. But Potemkin must have known that this was a fatal blow to Harris’s entire mission.³⁴ It was the sequel to Catherine’s successful mediation in the War of the Bavarian Succession. Britain claimed the right to detain neutral ships and condemn their cargo, but had made the mistake of detaining Russian ships. This maritime highhandedness angered neutrals, including Russia. In March 1780, Catherine therefore declared the principles of neutral rights at sea in her so-called ‘Armed Neutrality’, designed to puncture British arrogance, increase the Russian merchant navy and raise her prestige. Harris would have to offer more to get Russian attention.

—

Sir James wondered if Potemkin had been bribed by France or Prussia. At the same time, the French and Prussians suddenly thought Potemkin had been bribed by the English. This venal paranoia unleashed an orgy of bribery which must have seemed like manna from heaven to the greedy servants of Petersburg who were its main beneficiaries.

Harris was sure Corberon had bribed all the ‘valets de chambre and inferior agents in the Russian houses…being chiefly French’. Versailles was indeed determined to keep Russia out of the war and it was willing to throw money around St Petersburg to fix it – the French even boasted they had enough to buy Potemkin.³⁵ ‘I almost suspect my friend’s fidelity has been shaken,’ Harris confided to Viscount Stormont, Secretary of State for the North. Corberon was already telling Versailles that Harris disposed of a credit of £36,000 and had paid 100,000 roubles to Potemkin. Orlov-Chesmensky accused the Prince of receiving 150,000 British guineas. Harris thought France was paying £4,000/5,000 to Panin’s family.

At the end of March 1780, Harris could contain himself no longer. If the French were bribing ‘my friend’, then Britain should outbid them with a ‘similar bait’. The bribe market in St Petersburg now boomed like a bourse. Reminding Stormont that he was dealing with a ‘person immensely wealthy’, Harris suggested ‘as much as Torcy proposed, but without success, to Marlborough’.³⁶ Even the paymaster of Europe must have gulped.^*9 The Prussians and Austrians were also paying court to Potemkin. Harris observed the Prussian envoy in daily conferences with Potemkin and heard he was again offering Courland or ‘to insure him in the case of the Empress’s demise for his person, honours and property’ – that is, in the event of Paul’s succession. The Austrians on the other hand were rumoured to be offering him another principality.³⁷

Was Potemkin being bribed or not? The elephantine sums of 100,000 roubles or 150,000 guineas were mentioned in late 1779, but research into ‘the Secret Service Funds’ shows that, by November, Harris had drawn only £1,450 and was later told off for spending £3,000. Even put together, this might have pleased Sashenka Engelhardt, but was not even table money for the Prince himself. Harris’s doubts ‘disappeared’ – he realized that Potemkin’s ‘immense fortune places him above the reach of corruption’. Rich men can often be bribed with a little bit more, but Harris was probably right when he said that Potemkin could ‘only be attained by strict attention to his humour and character’. This was emphasized when Catherine gave her friend £40,000 sterling, according to Harris, to thank him for his help on the Armed Neutrality. It was a huge sum, but ‘so spoilt is this singular man that he scarcely considers it worth thanks’. The Prussian Goertz agreed that Potemkin was unbribable: ‘riches can do nothing – his are immense’.

Panin put all these figures into context when he disdainfully asked, ‘Do you really believe that £50,000 sterling is enough to buy Prince Potemkin?’ When Potemkin heard the rumour that Harris had given him two million roubles, he despised the very idea. The Englishman was convinced of Potemkin’s nobility. Serenissimus was too proud and too rich to be bribed.³⁸

Potemkin’s tactics were telling on Panin. Both believed the other was receiving bribes. This led to a tumultuous confrontation at the Council when Potemkin accused Panin of accepting French money or, as he put it, ‘the portraits of Louis XVI’ are excellent to ‘bet at whist’. Panin exploded that if he needed them, guineas were easier to get. Presumably Panin believed Potemkin was getting more than that laughable £50,000. The Empress was called to restore the peace.³⁹

Harris decided to find out if Serenissimus really supported an English alliance, so he bribed ‘the favourite secretary of Prince Potemkin…also the secretary to the Empress’. This was probably Alexander Bezborodko, who was becoming Catherine’s leading factotum in foreign affairs as Panin dwindled. Stormont agreed on the offer of £500, though he added that it was rather a lot. When it came to it, Harris was fleeced of nearer £3,000, though he did get closer to the reality of Potemkin’s policy. Bezborodko revealed that the monarchs of Europe, from Frederick to Joseph, were bombarding Potemkin with offers of thrones and money. No offer swayed him. He was not really zealous in the English cause, except when roused by rivalry with Panin. The ‘spy’ added that Potemkin lived by the ‘impulse of the moment’ and was quite capable of ‘adopting the political principles of every country’ but was keenest at that moment on Austria. There, at last, was the truth.⁴⁰

The diplomats had already heard Potemkin talking about real plans in the south. Even when discussing English fleets, Harris observed that Potemkin’s ‘mind is continually occupied with the idea of raising an Empire in the East’ and it was he ‘alone who heated and animated the Empress for this project’.⁴¹ Catherine was indeed infected with Potemkin’s exciting visions. When she talked to Harris, she ‘discoursed a long while…on the ancient Greeks, of their alacrity and superiority…and the same character being extant in the modern ones’.⁴² Corberon, who had heard it too, did not exaggerate when he wrote that ‘romantic ideas here are adopted with a fury’.⁴³ But the diplomats did not understand the significance of Potemkin’s ‘romantic ideas’ – his ‘Greek Project’ – that so excited Catherine. Serenissimus’ mind was not on London, Paris, Berlin or Philadelphia. It was on Tsargrad, the city of emperors – Constantinople. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was to be the dominating theme of the rest of his life and the foundation of his greatness.

Skip Notes

*1 Potemkin showed off many of Kingston’s treasures at his ball in 1791, described in Chapter 32. The Hermitage today, which holds much of the contents of Potemkin’s collections, is spotted with the former belongings of the Duchess of Kingston. Garnovsky was to be cursed for his avarice, for the Emperor Paul threw him into a debtor’s prison and he died poor in 1810.

*2 The Peacock Clock is one of the centrepieces of today’s Hermitage Museum. It still performs every hour on the hour.

*3 This now stands in the Menshikov Palace, part of the Hermitage, and is played at midday on Sundays. In its music, we can hear the sounds of Potemkin’s salon two centuries ago.

*4 There was a special Scottish relationship with Russia. The Scots often became Russianized. Empress Elisabeth’s Chancellor Bestuzhev was descended from a Scotsman named Best; Count Yakov Bruce was descended from Scots soldiers of fortune; Lermontov, the nineteenth-century poet, from a Learmond named ‘Thomas the Rhymer’.

*5 One Browne cousin was a field-marshal in the Austrian army, while George Browne joined Russian service, was captured by the Turks, sold thrice in Istanbul and then became governor of Livonia for most of Catherine the Great’s reign, dying in his nineties. Field-Marshal Count Lacey became Joseph II’s most trusted military adviser and correspondent, while another, Count Francis Antony Lacey, was Spanish Ambassador to Petersburg and Captain-General of all Catalonia.

*6 The British Cabinet Noir was much feared because it was based in George III’s Electorate of Hanover, a crossroads allowing it to intercept mail from all over Europe.

*7 Indeed, ‘travailler pour le roi de Prusse’ was a popular euphemism for ‘working without salary’.

*8 After Petersburg, Cagliostro toured Europe, causing a sensation everywhere, more like a pop star than a magus, but in Paris he became involved, through his patron the Cardinal de Rohan, in the Diamond Necklace Affair, the sting which so damaged Marie-Antoinette. Napoleon named it as one of the causes of the French Revolution. Cagliostro was actually found innocent in the trial that Marie-Antoinette so foolishly demanded and Louis XVI so rashly allowed, but he was ruined. He died a prisoner in 1795 in the Italian Papal fortress of San Leone.

*9 Stormont would have known that this was the positively imperial sum of two million francs. Louis XIV’s minister at the Hague offered the century’s most famous bribe to Marlborough in May 1709.