Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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ANGLOMANIA: THE BENTHAMS IN RUSSIA AND THE EMPEROR OF GARDENS

My love affair is at an end…I must certainly quit Petersburg…So it is lucky that an offer of Prince Potemkin offers me a good opportunity…

Samuel Bentham to his brother, Jeremy Bentham

On 11 December 1783, Prince Potemkin summoned to his apartments in Petersburg a young Englishman named Samuel Bentham, whose love affair and now broken heart had been followed by all society like a running soap opera, and offered him a glorious new career. This offer led, not only to the most adventurous life in war and peace ever enjoyed by an Englishman in Russia, but also to a farce in which an ill-sorted company of Welsh and Geordie artisans were settled on a Belorussian estate which they were to develop into Potemkin’s own industrial empire. The experiences of Samuel Bentham, soon to be joined on Potemkin’s estate by his philosopher brother Jeremy, reveal not just Serenissimus’ boundless dynamism but the way he used his own estates as the arsenal and marketplace of the state, with no boundary between his own money and that of the Empire.

Samuel Bentham was the youngest of seven children – Jeremy was the eldest – and they were the only two who survived. Their father Jeremiah was a well-connected lawyer whose patron was the future Whig Prime Minister, the original but devious Earl of Shelburne, nicknamed the ‘Jesuit of Berkeley Square’ by his many enemies. They were a touchingly close family, writing to each other constantly, worrying about Samuel’s escapades in Russia. The brothers shared a brilliant intelligence, a driving energy and an outstanding inventiveness, but personally they were opposites: Jeremy, now almost forty, was a shy, scholarly judicialist. Samuel was loquacious, sociable, irritable and amorous. Trained as an engineer but uninhibited by the profession, he was an inventive polymath and entrepreneur. In some ways he shared Potemkin’s restless ebullience – he was ‘always running from a good scheme to a better…life passes away and nothing is completed’.¹

In 1780, while Jeremy worked on his judicial reforms in London, Samuel, aged twenty-three, departed on a voyage that took him to the Black Sea coast (where he observed the burgeoning Kherson) and thence to St Petersburg, where he called on Potemkin. He hoped to make his fortune, while Jeremy wanted him to propose his legal ideas to the Empress.² Serenissimus monitored young Bentham’s progress. The Englishman realized that the Prince was the man who could put his ideas into practice. Potemkin wanted his help with the Dnieper rapids and his estates and made a vague offer to him soon after meeting him.³ But Samuel wanted to travel so, in 1781, the Prince despatched him on a trip to Siberia to analyse its industries, providing him with a couple of soldiers as guards. On his return, the Prince gave his papers on Mines, Fabricks and Salt-Works⁴ to the Empress.

Potemkin was looking for talented engineers, shipbuilders, entrepreneurs and Englishmen: Samuel was all of these things. Writing to his brother Jeremy from Irkutsk in Siberia, Samuel boasted about his new contact – ‘the man in power’.⁵ It was obvious to the excited traveller that he and this anonymous potentate were made for each other:

This man’s business is to greater amount than any other’s I have heard of in the Empire. His position at Court is also the best on which account, as well as that of his riches, Governors of course bow down to him. His chief affairs lie about the Black Sea. He there farms the duties on some articles, builds ships for the Crown, supplies the army and the Crown in general with all necessaries, has fabricks of various kinds and is clearing the waterfalls of the Dnieper at his own private expense. He was very anxious to have assistance in his undertakings before I left St Petersburg.⁶

However, on his return Bentham was distracted by something much more alluring.

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The object of his affections was Countess Sophia Matushkina, pretty niece and ward of Field-Marshal Prince Alexander Golitsyn, the Governor of Petersburg whose failures of command during the Russo-Turkish War were now obscured by the prestige of age. Samuel and the Countess, roughly the same age, met in the Field-Marshal’s salon, fell in love and managed to meet twice a week. Their passion was fanned by the operatic intrigues made necessary by the disapproval of old Golitsyn and the interest shown by the whole Court. The Field-Marshal was against any courtship, yet alone marriage, between his ward and this English golddigger. The Empress, however, who combined mischief with a certain amorousness herself, let the Court know that she was thoroughly enjoying the scandal.

At this point, Samuel’s ambitious imagination ran wild. ‘If you have anything to say to me for or against a Matrimonial Connection,’ he asked Jeremy, ‘let me know.’ He loved the girl – and her position, for he added disarmingly: ‘She is heiress to two Rich People.’ Samuel decided his love affair had caused such interest that it would help him get a job from the Empress, a novel sort of curriculum vitae, though one not unknown in Russia: ‘I am fully disposed that a desire Her Majesty has to assist my Match goes a great way in disposing her in my favour…she fully believes it was my Love induced me to offer my Services.’ He also wrote letters to Field-Marshal Golitsyn declaring, ‘it’s already more than five months since I loved your niece’. This can only have further incensed the Field-Marshal, who banned the couple from seeing each other.

The courtiers relished this forbidden romance as much as the Empress – and, even while annexing the Crimea, Potemkin was also kept informed. It was a wonderful moment to be an Englishman in Petersburg and Samuel lived a dizzy social existence, bathing in the attention of magnates and countesses. Petersburg was full of Englishmen – Sir James Harris, and his successor as British envoy Alleyne Fitzherbert, patronized him. His only enemy among them was the permanent Scotsman at court – Dr Rogerson, that accomplished gambler and usually fatal doctor. Perhaps suspecting Bentham’s motives, Rogerson told Catherine that Samuel was not worth meeting because he had a speech defect.⁷ This did not hold him back. Samuel’s two best Russian friends were on Potemkin’s staff, Princess Dashkova’s son, Prince Pavel Mikhailovich Dashkov, and Colonel Korsakov, the engineer, both educated in Britain. The Russians took Bentham to the salons of all the magnates who kept open tables for foreigners. Here is a typical undated day in Samuel’s social whirl: ‘Breakfasted at Fitzherbert, dined by invitation at the Duchess of Kingston’s [back on another visit], then to Prince Dashkov’s, to Potemkin’s but as he was not at home, went to Baroness Stroganov and from there to supper at Dashkov’s.’⁸

Probably at Catherine’s prompting, her favourite, Lanskoy, now intervened on Samuel’s behalf, telling Sophia’s aunt and mother that ‘the Empress thought they did wrong to oppose the young Countess’s inclinations…This only irritated the aunt more.’ There were few cities in the world, even in Italy, as well arranged for intrigue as Petersburg, where the Court itself set the pace and where battalions of servants made the business of sending notes, eavesdropping and watching for secret signs at windows cheap and comprehensive. So, aided by his friends, Samuel and Sophia enjoyed Romeo and Juliet scenes on balconies in the dim gardens of palaces. Valets and coachmen bore secret letters that were pressed into manicured hands. Countess Sophia let down perfumed epistles to Sam from her windows.⁹ Samuel, intoxicated by the grandeur of those involved in his affairs, suffered from the delusion common to many in love that they are the centre of the known world. He felt the very cabinets of Europe had forgotten wars and treaties, and were exclusively discussing his trysts.

Therefore when Potemkin returned triumphantly with the Crimea and Georgia at his feet, Samuel was convinced that Serenissimus’ first question would be about his love. The Prince was much more interested in the Englishman’s shipbuilding potential. But he knew from his courtiers that Bentham’s affair was doomed. The Empress may have liked teasing the Golitsyns – but she was never going to support an Englishman against the scions of Gedimin of Lithuania. So Lanskoy, imperial intervention manifested in flesh, intervened again: the affair must end.

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On 6 December, the crestfallen Samuel called on the Prince, who had Korsakov offer him a job at Kherson. Samuel resisted Potemkin’s offer – still hoping Countess Sophia’s love would lead to marriage. But it was all over. Petersburg was no longer such fun. Samuel resolved to leave ‘out of delicacy’ to the pining Countess, so he accepted the job. Potemkin appointed him lieutenant-colonel with a salary of 1,200 roubles a year and ‘much more for table money’. The Prince had many plans for young Samuel – he was going to move his dockyards below the bar in the Dnieper and he wanted Samuel to erect his various mechanical inventions ‘under his command’.

The fortunate Colonel was now almost in love with Potemkin, like so many Westerners before and after him. It is interesting how Bentham perceived the Prince’s unique position: ‘his immediate command is all the Southern part of the country and his indirect command is the whole Empire’. The melodramatic lover of the months before was now replaced by Potemkin’s self-congratulatory protégé: ‘While I enjoy the share of the Prince’s good opinion and confidence which I flatter myself I possess at present, my situation cannot be disagreeable. Everything I propose to him, he accedes to.’ When the Prince was interested in someone, he treated him with more respect than all the generals of the empires of Europe put together: now Samuel was that person. ‘I go to him at all times. He speaks to me whenever I come into the room giving me the bonjour and makes me sit down when the stars and ribbons may come ten times without his asking them to sit down or even looking at them.’

Potemkin’s idiosyncratic management style bemused Colonel Bentham: ‘as to what employment I am to have at Kherson or elsewhere…’. Serenissimus also mentioned ‘an Estate on the Borders of Poland…One day he talks of a new port and dockyard below the Bar, another he talks about my erecting windmills in the Crimea. A month hence I may have a regiment of Hussars and be sent against…the Chinese and then command a ship of 100 guns.’ He was to end up doing almost all of the above. He certainly could not complain that working for Potemkin was going to be boring. However, as to his immediate destiny, he could only inform his brother: ‘I can tell you nothing.’

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On 10 March 1784, the Prince abruptly departed from Petersburg for the south, leaving Bentham’s arrangements to Colonel Popov, his head of Chancellery.¹⁰ At midnight on Wednesday, 13 March, Bentham followed in a convoy of seven kibitkas. Samuel kept a diary of these days: he arrived in Moscow on Saturday to meet Potemkin. When he presented himself to the Prince on Sunday morning in his usual frockcoat, Serenissimus called in ever-ready Popov, told him to list the boy in the army, cavalry or infantry, whichever he liked – he chose the infantry – and put on his lieutenant-colonel’s uniform.¹¹ Henceforth Bentham always wore his green coat with scarlet lapels, scarlet waistcoat with gold lace, and white breeches.¹²

A season of travelling with the Prince round his empire was a privilege accorded to very few foreigners – but Potemkin only tolerated those who were the best company. For six months, Samuel travelled round the Empire ‘always in the same carriage’ as Potemkin: ‘The journey I have been making this spring with the Prince, to me who do not think much of fatigue, has been in every respect highly agreeable…I had not for a long time spent my time so merrily.’¹³ They headed south via Borodino, Viazma and Smolensk, passed through Potemkin’s estates at Orsha on the upper Dnieper, noting that Potemkin’s leather tannery already employed two tanners from Newcastle. They then headed off to Potemkin’s southern headquarters, Kremenchuk. Bentham must have been with the Prince when he inaugurated his new Viceroyalty of Ekaterinoslav. They were in the Crimea by early June: they must have visited the new naval base at Sebastopol together. On the road, Lieutenant-Colonel Bentham experienced the way that Potemkin ran his empire from the back of a speeding sledge that travelled thousands of versts in a spray of ice.

Somewhere in this perambulating horse-powered seat of government, the Prince decided that Lieutenant-Colonel Bentham was not to stay in Kherson. In July, Bentham arrived at his new posting – Krichev. Potemkin’s sprawling estate ‘on the borders of Poland’ was another world, all of its own.¹⁴

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Bentham was appointed the sole master of an estate that was ‘larger than any county of England’ and indeed than many German principalities: Krichev itself was, according to Bentham, over 100 square miles, but it was right next to another Potemkin estate, Dubrovna, which was even larger. At Krichev, there were five townships and 145 hamlets – 14,000 male serfs. Together, the population of these two territories was ‘upwards of 40,000 male vassals’, as Samuel put it, which meant that the whole number of inhabitants must have been at least double that.¹⁵

The Krichev–Dubrovna estates were not only big but also strategically vital: when Russia annexed these Polish territories in the First Partition of 1772, Catherine gained control of the upper reaches of two of Europe’s greatest trading rivers: the right (north) bank of the Dvina that led to Riga on the Baltic and the left or east bank of the Dnieper, on which Potemkin was to build so many of his cities. When Catherine granted lands to Potemkin in 1776, he may have requested estates that happened to have access to both rivers and therefore were potential trading stations with both the Baltic and the Black Sea: ideal for making small ships, Potemkin’s lands flanked the north bank of the Dnieper for an awesome fifty miles.

Potemkin was already the master of an industrial empire, best known for its factories making Russia’s most beautiful mirrors, a sign of the boom in demand for looking-glasses that literally reflected the eighteenth century’s new self-awareness.^*1 And then there was Krichev.¹⁶ Bentham found a brandy distillery, factory, tannery, copperworks, textile mill with 172 looms making sailcloth, a rope walk with twenty wheels, supplying Kherson’s shipyards, a complex of greenhouses, a pottery, a shipyard and yet another mirror-factory. Krichev was an extension of Kherson. ‘The estate…furnishes all the principal naval stores in the greatest abundance by a navigable river which…renders the transport easy to the Black Sea.’¹⁷ The trade went in both directions: there was already a surplus of cordage and sailcloth that was traded on to Constantinople, while there was a booming import–export business to Riga. This was Potemkin’s imperial arsenal, his manufacturing and trading headquarters, his inland shipyard and the chief supplier of his new cities and navy on the Black Sea.

Krichev was another world from the salons of Petersburg, yet alone the chambers of Lincoln’s Inn, but it must have been even more of a shock to Bentham’s recruits from England. Bentham moved into what was called ‘Potemkin’s house’ but which was really just a ‘tottering barn’.¹⁸ The enthusiastic and arrogant Englishman had landed at one of Europe’s crossroads: not only did the riverways converge there, but the place was a cultural cauldron too. ‘The situation is picturesque and pleasant, the people…quiet and patient to the last degree…industrious or idle and drunken.’ There were forty poverty-stricken Polish noblemen who worked on the estate ‘almost as slaves’. It teemed with different races and languages.

This was all most confusing and alarming to a newly arrived artisan from Newcastle, who had never travelled before. ‘The heterogeneous mixture of people here is surprising,’ Beaty, a Geordie heckler, confessed. There were Russians, Germans, Don Cossacks, Polish Jews – and the English. At first ‘I thought it a collection of the strangest sounds that ever invaded my English ears.’ The Jews, from whom ‘we had to buy all the necessities of life’, spoke German or Yiddish.¹⁹ Beaty could only muse that ‘on a Market Day when I behold such an odd Medley of Faces and Dresses, I have more than once started and wondered what brought me amongst them’.²⁰

Samuel’s responsibilities over all these people were equally extensive: firstly he was now the ‘Legislator, Judge, Jury and Sheriff’ of the local serfs. Then, ‘I have the direction and putting in order of all the Prince’s fabriks here.’ The factories were lamentable.²¹ So Bentham offered to take them over. ‘Extremely agreeable,’ replied Potemkin from Tsarskoe Selo, professing himself ‘charmed with your activity and the project of your obliging responsibility’.²²

The Prince was always thinking of improving his cities and warships. Disproving his supposed allergy to detail or to seeing his projects through, he turned to the cordage factory: ‘They tell me the cordage…is scarcely fit for use.’²³ He begged Bentham to improve it and sent him an expert from Kronstadt. When Samuel’s friends Korsakov and the sailor Mordvinov, both senior officers of Potemkin’s, visited on the way to Kherson, Bentham reported to Serenissimus that he was supplying them with whatever they needed for their shipbuilding.²⁴ After almost two years, Samuel was doing so well with his mills that he suggested a deal to the Prince: he would actually take over the less successful factories for ten years while Potemkin kept the profitable ones. All the buildings and materials would be supplied along with 20,000 roubles (about £5,000) of capital, which he would gradually repay. In the deal signed in January 1786, Serenissimus asked for no income whatsoever during the ten years – he simply hoped to receive the factories back in a profitable state at the end. His real interest was not profit but imperial benefit.²⁵

One of Bentham’s suggestions was to import potatoes and plant them at Krichev: Potemkin approved. The first twelve acres were sown in 1787 and a ‘much pleased’ Prince kept growing them on his other estates afterwards. Some histories claim that Potemkin and Bentham brought potatoes to Russia. This is not true – Catherine arranged their import during the 1760s, but the Prince was the first to cultivate them and it was probably thanks to him that they became part of the staple Russian diet.²⁶

Bentham’s main task was to build ships for Potemkin – all sorts, any sort at all. ‘I seem to be at liberty to build any kind of ship…whether for War, Trade or Pleasure.’ The Prince wanted gun frigates for the navy, a pleasure frigate for the Empress, barges for the Dnieper trade and ultimately luxury barges for the Empress’s long-planned visit to the south. It was a tall if not towering order. There was a priceless moment of Potemkinish exasperation when Bentham tried to pin down the Prince about the ship design. Did Serenissimus want one mast, two masts, and how many guns? ‘He told me by way of ending the dispute that there might be twenty masts and one Gun if I pleased. I am a little confused…’.²⁷ What inventor could want for a more indulgent, and maddening, master?

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Soon Samuel realized he needed help. His ships required rowers, whether peasants or soldiers. This was no problem: the Prince delivered, as if by magic, a battalion of Musketeers. ‘I give you the command,’ wrote Serenissimus from Petersburg in September. Potemkin was always thinking about his beloved navy: ‘My intention, sir, is that they shall be capable one day of serving at sea, therefore I exhort you…to qualify them for it.’²⁸ Bentham naturally had no idea how to command soldiers or speak Russian, so when a major asked for orders on parade, Samuel replied: ‘Same as yesterday.’ How was this manoeuvre to be conducted? ‘As usual,’ ordered Bentham.²⁹ There were only ‘two or three Sergeants’ who could write, yet alone draw, plus the two leather-makers from Newcastle at Orsha, a young mathematician from Strasbourg, a Danish brass-founder and a Scottish watchmaker.³⁰ Samuel bombarded the Prince with requests for artisans: ‘I’m finding it very difficult to recruit people of talent,’³¹ he complained in one unpublished letter. The Prince replied that he could hire workmen on whatever terms he liked.

The Prince’s obsessional Anglomania now exploded into one of the most energetic recruitment campaigns ever designed to lure British experts to distant climes. Anglophilia ruled Europe.³² In Paris, men sported ‘Windsor collars’ and plain frockcoats, ladies drank Scotch whisky, took tea while betting on jockeys at the races and playing whist.^*2 Potemkin did not care about the details but he knew that he wanted only Englishmen, not only to drive the looms of Krichev but also to run his botanical gardens, dairies, windmills and shipyards from the Crimea to Krichev. The Benthams placed advertisements in English newspapers. These advertisements unconsciously catch the capricious demands of Potemkin. ‘The Prince wants to introduce the use of beer,’ announced one. Or he ‘means to have an elegant dairy’ with ‘the best of butter and as many kinds of cheese as possible’. Soon the advertisements had expanded to anyone British: ‘Any clever people capable of introducing improvements in the Prince’s Government might meet with good encouragement,’ read one Bentham advertisement in Britain. Finally Potemkin just declared to Samuel that he wished to create a ‘whole colony of English’ with their own church and privileges.³³ Potemkin’s Anglophilia of course extended to his subordinates. Local landowners wanted their peasants trained with English smiths so Dashkov’s serfs were sent over to learn English carpentry.³⁴ After Potemkin’s future Admiral Mordvinov married Henrietta Cobley, Nikolai Korsakov confessed to Samuel that he too ‘was exceedingly desirous of an English wife’.³⁵ Gardeners, sailors and artisans were not enough. The Russians wanted wives too.

Bentham’s budget was limitless. When he bothered Serenissimus to fix some bounds on the credit, ‘ “What is necessary” was the only answer I could get.’ Sutherland, Potemkin’s banker, simply arranged the credit in London.³⁶ Samuel Bentham immediately saw opportunities for him and his brother Jeremy to trade in goods between England and Russia and to be the middlemen of Potemkin’s recruiting campaign. Within weeks of the first advertisements, Samuel was sending Jeremy shopping lists by the dozen: one, for example, demanded a millwright, a windmill expert, a cloth-weaver, barge-or boat-builders, shoemakers, bricklayers, sailors, housekeepers, ‘two under-maids, one to understand cheese-making, the other, spinning and knitting.’³⁷

Father and brother, Jeremiah and Jeremy Bentham, enthusiastically scoured Britain. Old Jeremiah excelled himself – he called on Lord Howe at the Admiralty, then invited Under-Secretary of State Fraser and two recently returned Russian veterans, Sir James Harris and Reginald Pole Carew, to his house to discuss it. He even roped in the former Prime Minister Shelburne, now first Marquess of Lansdowne³⁸ – ‘all to procure shipwrights to be sent to my son’s assistance’. The Marquess thought Potemkin was interesting but untrustworthy and his compliments about the Bentham brothers were distinctly back-handed: ‘Both your sons are too liberal in their temper to adopt a mercantile spirit and your Sam’s mind will be more occupied with fresh inventions than with calculating compound interest which the dullest men Russia can perhaps do as well…’, wrote Lansdowne from Weymouth on 21 August 1786. ‘He is spending his best years in a changeable country and relying on men of changeable tempers.’³⁹

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The whole frantic project now assumes some of the absurdity of an eighteenth-century situation comedy in which a mixed group of philosophers, sailors, phoneys, hussies and workmen are dropped without a word of any foreign language into a multilingual Belorussian village owned by an often invisible but impulsive Serenissimus. Each of these characters turns out to have a completely different agenda to the one assigned by the Benthams.

Jeremy became possessed by a sort of Catherinian graphomania and kept writing to Samuel with interminable superfluous details on a parade of candidates for posts varying from chief of botanical gardens to milkmaid: ‘With the respect to the Botanist, I conceive there cannot be the least difficulty in finding a man of science’ and then debated the costs of ‘The Dairy Lady’. Finally, Jeremy recruited a Logan Henderson to run the said botanical garden. Naturally such an adventurous expedition attracted a motley crew: Henderson for example was a Scotsman who claimed to be an ‘expert’ on gardens, steam-engines, sugar-planting and phosphorous fireworks. He signed up, promising also to deliver his two nieces, the Miss Kirtlands, as dairymaids. Dr John Debraw, the ex-apothecary of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and revered author of that significant work, Discoveries on the Sex of Bees (just published to mixed reviews), signed up as Potemkin’s experimental chemist along with gardeners, millwrights, hecklers, mostly from Newcastle or Scotland: the first tranche reached Riga in June 1785.

Jeremy Bentham longed to join Samuel in Belorussia: he saw not only mercantile opportunities but peace in which to work on his treatises, and statesmen like Potemkin who could put his utilitarian ideas into practice. (His utilitarian theory measured the success of rulers by their ability to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number.) Potemkin’s estates sounded like a philosopher’s dream. Jeremy decided to bring out another group of his recruits. By the time he set off, Samuel was exasperated with his brother’s ludicrous letters. Things really deteriorated when the philosopher began to write directly to the Prince himself suggesting quixotic ideas and telling him about gardeners and chemists: Potemkin’s archives contain many of these unpublished works of Jeremy Bentham. They are priceless both as historic documents and as works of comic entertainment: the phrase ‘mad professor’ comes to mind.

Jeremy planned to buy a ship to bear the Prince’s artisans, proposing to name it The Prince Potemkin. Then to business: ‘Here, Monseigneur, is your Botanist. Here is your milkmaid. The milk is good in Cheshire, county of cheese…’. Mademoiselle Kirtland, the milkmaid who was also an admirable chemist, stimulated this Benthamite exposition of feminism: ‘Knowledgeable women so often lose the perfection of their own sex by acquiring those of ours…That is scarcely true with Mademoiselle Kirtland.’ The philosopher really wanted to sell Potemkin a ‘machine de feu’ or, even better, the latest steam-engine of Watts and Bolton, explaining that these were mechanisms ‘which play by the force of water reduced to vapours in boiling. Of all the machines of modernity…the easiest to construct is the machine de feu’, but the hardest and costliest was the Watts and Bolton. If the Prince did not want the steam-engine, how about setting up a printing press in the Crimea with a Mr Titler? What would this printing press publish? Jeremy suggested Project of the Body of the Laws by one J. Bentham. Jeremy apologetically signed himself, ‘Here for the fourth time, Your Eternal Correspondent’.⁴⁰

Samuel panicked. Serenissimus hated long letters and wanted results. Colonel Bentham feared his career was being ruined by the ‘Eternal Correspondent’ so he told off his bungling brother. The Prince would have found the details ‘troublesome’ and ‘expected to hear no more until the people made their appearance’. Samuel was anxious because Potemkin had not replied: ‘I fear the worst…I hope to lay the blame on your over-zeal.’⁴¹ But the philosopher finally received a courteous letter from the Prince via the Russian Embassy in London. ‘Sir,’ the Prince wrote to Jeremy, ‘I have to thank you for the care you have given yourself in the execution of the Commissions…on my account. The time did not permit me to come to a resolution sooner…but now I have to beg you to engage Mr Henderson to accompany the Persons…’. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham’s long but brilliant letters were exactly the sort of fascinating distraction that the Prince relished: he sent word he enjoyed them immensely and was having them translated into Russian.⁴²

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Jeremy Bentham was most proud of recruiting a landscape gardener for Krichev named John Ayton, because, as he boasted to his father, ‘our Gardener is Nephew to the King’s Gardener at Kew’.⁴³ This was a time when there was an aristocracy of gardeners too. Yet Ayton did not become the Prince’s star gardener. Potemkin’s green-fingered factotum had already arrived in Russia in 1780, at about the same time as Samuel Bentham. His name was William Gould, a protégé of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the master of the English garden. During the 1770s, Catherine and Potemkin simultaneously became avid devotees of the English garden. In no other field was the Prince’s Anglomania so marked as in his addiction to creating English gardens wherever he was.

The natural, picturesque (but intricately planned) chaos of the English garden, with its lakes, grottoes, landscaping and ruins, was now gradually vanquishing the formal precise French garden. The fortunes of the gardens followed those of the kingdoms: when Louis XIV dominated Europe, so did French gardens. As France declined and Britain conquered its empire, its gardens also triumphed. ‘I adore English gardens,’ Catherine told Voltaire, ‘with their curved lines, pente-douces, ponds like lakes (archipelagoes on dry land); and I despise deeply straight lines and identical allées…In a word, anglomania is more important to me than “plantomania”.’⁴⁴

The Empress approached her new gardening hobby with her usual levelheaded practicality, while Potemkin vaulted it with his typical obsessional singlemindedness. In 1779, the Empress had hired John Bush and his son Joseph to landscape her gardens at Tsarskoe Selo. On her other estates, she hired other green-fingered Englishmen with garden names – Sparrow and Hackett. It was a mark of his Anglomania that Potemkin clearly regarded an English gardener as the equal of a Russian aristocrat: such was his respect for these lords of the flowerbed that he dined at the Bushes’ with two of his nieces, one of their husbands Count Skavronsky, and three ambassadors, a social puzzle that alarmed a supposedly more democratic English visitor, Baroness Dimsdale.⁴⁵ She observed that Potemkin relished Bush’s ‘excellent dinner in the English taste’ and ate as much as he could. (Serenissimus so relished English cooking that, when his banker Sutherland gave him roast beef for dinner, he took the rest home with him.) Soon Potemkin’s gardening requirements were so great that he recruited Ayton from England and borrowed Sparrow from Catherine.⁴⁶

None of these became as famous as Potemkin’s Gould, who is still celebrated in distant corners of Russia and Ukraine today: in 1998, this author heard his name in places as far apart as Petersburg and Dneipropetrovsk. Gould was lucky to be recruited by a man described by the Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) as ‘one of the most extravagant encouragers of our art that modern times can boast’. But Potemkin was also fortunate to find his gardening alter ego – the capable and grandiose creator of massive English gardens across the Empire that defied distance and imagination.

Gould employed a staff of ‘several hundred assistants’ who travelled in Potemkin ’s wake.⁴⁷ He planned and executed gardens in Astrakhan, Ekaterinoslav, Nikolaev and the Crimea, including on the estates on the lush Crimean coast at Artek, Massandra and the site of the Alupka Palace.^*3 Local cognoscenti still breathe his name with reverence two centuries after he last hoed.⁴⁸ Potemkin discovered the ruins of one of Charles XII’s castles, perhaps near Poltava. He not only had it repaired but had Gould surround it with yet more English gardens.

Gould’s extraordinary speciality was building English gardens overnight, on the spot, wherever Potemkin stayed. The Encyclopaedia of Gardening, which gave one of Gould’s junior gardeners, Call, as its source, claims that wherever Potemkin stopped he would set up a travelling palace and Gould would create an English garden, composed of ‘shrubs and trees, divided by gravel walks and ornamented with seats and statues, all carried with his cavalcade’. Most historians have presumed that the stories of Potemkin’s instant English gardens were simply legends – it was surely impossible that Gould travelled with a convoy of oak trees, rockeries and shrubberies. But here Legend and Reality merge: the State Archives in Petersburg, which contain Potemkin’s accounts, show that Gould constantly travelled with Potemkin to places where we know from other sources that these gardens were indeed laid out in a matter of days. There was something of Haroun al-Rashid about Potemkin. He was, as Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun put it, ‘a sort of enchanter such as one reads about in the Arabian Nights.‘^*4

Gould now rushed across Russia, working in tandem with the Prince. Gould became ‘the [Capability] Brown of Russia’ but, warned the Encyclopaedia of Gardening, ‘a foreigner established as head gardener to an Emperor becomes a despot like his master’. One senses a gardener’s jealousy of one of their kind raised to the level of a tsar of shrubberies, the Potemkin of gardens.⁴⁹

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Naturally, Potemkin pursued his Anglomania in painting too. He collected pictures and engravings and was said to own works of Titian, Van Dyck, Poussin, Raphael and da Vinci. The Prince used merchants and Russian ambassadors as his art dealers: ‘I’ve not yet found the landscape painting you wanted, my Prince, but I hope to have it soon,’⁵⁰ wrote the Russian Ambassador in the Baroque capital of Saxony, Dresden.

Now Potemkin’s English network led him to Sir Joshua Reynolds. When Harris returned to London in 1784, he gave John Joshua Proby, Lord Carysfort, a letter of introduction to Potemkin: ‘the bearer of this letter is a man of birth – a peer of Ireland’.⁵¹ Carysfort arrived in Petersburg and suggested to both the Empress and the Prince that their collections lacked English works: what about his friend Reynolds? Both agreed. The subjects were left to the artist – but Potemkin wanted something from history which suited Reynolds’s taste. Four years later, after many delays, Catherine received one painting and Potemkin two. Carysfort and Reynolds wrote to the Prince in French as the paintings set off aboard the ship Friendship. Thanking him for his hospitality in Russia, Carysfort explained to Potemkin that Catherine’s painting was ‘a young Hercules who strangles the Serpent’, adding, ‘It would be superfluous to remark to Your Highness, who has so perfect a knowledge of Ancient Literature, the story that the Painting has taken from the Odes of Pindar.’^*5 Reynolds himself told Potemkin that he was going to do him the same painting, then decided on something else. This turned out to be the The Continence of Scipio. Carysfort also sent him Reynolds’s The Nymph whose Belt is Untied by a Cupidon. ‘Connoisseurs’, wrote Carysfort, ‘who have seen it have found it a great beauty.’⁵²

It was indeed a ‘great beauty’. Both paintings seem appropriate for Potemkin. The Nymph, or Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus as it now called, depicts the lively little Cupid undoing the belt of a glowing, bare-breasted Venus. In the other painting, Scipio, Potemkin’s ideal Classical hero – who defeated the Carthaginians as he was defeating the Turks – fights off the temptations of women and money, two things Potemkin could never resist.⁵³ Neither Catherine nor Potemkin was in any hurry to pay: Reynolds charged Carysfort £105 for the Nymph. Catherine paid Reynolds’s executors.^*6 Later, Potemkin added a Kneller and a Thomas Jones to his English collection.

Serenissimus also patronized the best English artist in Petersburg, Richard Brompton, a Bohemian ‘harum-scarum ingenious sort of painter’, according to Jeremy Bentham, whom Catherine rescued from debtor’s prison. Potemkin almost became Brompton’s agent, even advising him what to charge. He commissioned him to paint Branicka: the splendid full-length canvas, now in the Alupka Palace in the Crimea, catches Sashenka’s pert prettiness, her clever haughtiness. Brompton also painted the Empress but, Potemkin personally ordered changes to her hair. Joseph II bought the painting, only to complain that this ‘daubing’ was ‘so horribly painted that I wanted to send it back’.⁵⁴ Brompton often appealed to Potemkin in scrawled unpublished letters that fret about money and imperial patronage.⁵⁵ When he died leaving 5,000 roubles’ debts, Potemkin gave his widow 1,000 roubles.⁵⁶

The enthusiasm with which Potemkin and Catherine shared their artistic tastes is another charming aspect of their relationship. When the two of them retired alone for two hours in 1785, the diplomats thought a war had started, until they learned that the couple were happily perusing some Levantine drawings brought by Sir Richard Worsley, an English traveller. Given their shared enjoyment, it was fitting that, after the Prince’s demise, his collection joined Catherine’s in the Hermitage.⁵⁷

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Meanwhile, on 28 July 1785, Jeremy Bentham set out from Brighton, bearing Shelburne’s wordly advice: ‘get into no intrigues to serve either England or Russia, not even with a handsome lady’.⁵⁸ He met up with Logan Henderson and the two lissom Miss Kirtlands at Paris and travelled on via Nice and Florence (where he spotted a ‘poor old gentleman’ at the opera – the Young Pretender). The group sailed from Leghorn to Constantinople. Thence Jeremy sent Henderson and the two Miss Kirtlands by sea to the Crimea. He made his own way overland: after a dramatic journey with the sister of the Hospodar of Moldavia and twenty horsemen, he reached Krichev in February 1786.⁵⁹ It was a joyous reunion: the Bentham brothers had not seen each other for five and a half years.

Once the party was complete, the Belorussian village seemed to turn into a Tower of Babel of quarrelling, drinking and wife-swapping. The recruits were as ragged a crew as could be expected, and few were quite what they claimed: Samuel tried to control this ‘Newcastle mob – hirelings from that rabble town’.⁶⁰

Jeremy confessed to Samuel that Henderson’s milkmaid ‘nieces’, who had so impressed him with their femininity and knowledge, were neither cheese-makers nor any relation to the gardener: they were apparently troilists. Henderson did not turn out successfully. Potemkin settled the gardener and the two milking ‘nieces’ in the Tartar house near Karasubazaar. The sentimental Prince remembered his recovery from fever there in August 1783 and bought it. However, he soon learned that Henderson was a ‘shameless impostor’ who had not even ‘planted a single blade of grass and Mamzel [one of the girls] has not made a single cheese’.⁶¹

Roebuck, another recruit, travelled with his ‘soi-disant wife’, who turned out to be a thorough slattern. She offered ‘her services to either of the Newcastle men’, wishing to be rid of her ruffian husband.⁶² Samuel managed to pass her on to Prince Dashkov: these Russian Anglophiles were grateful for a gardener’s wench – if she came from the land of Shakespeare. Samuel suspected ‘the very quarrelsome’ Roebuck of stealing diamonds at Riga – he was ‘not the most honest’. When Potemkin summoned Samuel, Jeremy was left in charge, which led to more bad behaviour. Dr Debraw, the bee sexologist, proved an utter nuisance. He stalked into Jeremy’s study ‘with a countenance of a man out of Bedlam’ and demanded a pass to leave. This stew of crooks even stole Samuel’s money to pay off their debts.⁶³ There were rebellions against the Benthams led by Benson the general factotum, who again ‘like a man let loose from Bedlam’ abused Jeremy, who had never seen him before in his life.⁶⁴ Then ‘the termagant cook–housekeeper’ joined ‘the male seducers’ by luring ‘old Benson’ to her bed.⁶⁵ The word ‘Bedlam’ appeared with ominous and appropriate frequency in the Benthams’ letters.

Despite the capers of these expatriates, the Benthams achieved an immense amount, both literary and mercantile: ‘The day has an abundance more hours in it at Krichev or rather at our cottage three miles off where I now live,’ wrote Jeremy. ‘I rise a little before the sun, get breakfast done in less than an hour and do not eat again until eight…at night.’ He was working on his Code of civil law, a French version of the Rationale of Reward and the Defence of Usury. But he had also ‘been obliged to go a begging to my brother and borrow an idea…’. This was the Panopticon – Samuel’s solution to supervising this rabble of Russians, Jews and Geordies: a factory constructed so that the manager could see all his workers from one central observation point. Jeremy the legal reformer could immediately see its use in prisons. He worked from dawn till dusk on the Panopticon.⁶⁶

Both Jeremy and Samuel were also pursuing another great ambition that was close to Potemkin’s heart: to become landowners in the Crimea. ‘We are going to be great farmers,’ announced Jeremy. ‘I dare say he would give us a good portion of land to both of us if we wish it…’.⁶⁷ But despite Potemkin’s cruelly teasing Samuel – ‘you have only to say of which kind’⁶⁸ – the Benthams never became Crimean magnates – though they did get a share in one of Korsakov’s estates.

Samuel meanwhile was running the factories, trading with Riga and Kherson in foreign exchange (changing Potemkin’s 20,000 roubles for ducats) and English cloth, and building baidaks (riverboats) for the Dnieper. Despite the ‘Bedlamite’ behaviour of his recruits, he often praised other workers who helped him to achieve so much. In the first two years he had already built two big vessels and eight baidaks; in 1786, he produced an impressive twenty baidaks.⁶⁹ It was all so dramatic and exciting that old Jeremiah Bentham decided he might to come out too. But two Benthams were enough.

In 1786, Potemkin’s orders changed. Since 1783, Catherine and Potemkin had been debating when the Empress should inspect her new domains in the south. The trip had always been delayed but now it looked as if it would actually happen. Samuel was already an expert at building barges and baidaks for the Dnieper. Now Potemkin ordered him to produce thirteen yachts and twelve luxury barges in which the Empress could cruise down the Dnieper to Kherson. Samuel had been experimenting with a new invention which he called ‘the vermicular’, which is best described as ‘an oar-propelled articulated floating train, a series of floating boxes cunningly linked together’.⁷⁰ Samuel set to work and managed to fulfil Potemkin’s massive order, to which he added an imperial vermicular – a six-section barge, 252 feet long, driven by 120 oars.

—

Jeremy Bentham, who wanted to meet the famous Potemkin, was waiting for Serenissimus to visit the estate while Samuel was away, testing his ships. Since it seems that most of Russia spent much of this period feverishly anticipating the arrival of the ‘Prince of Princes’, this was not surprising. Meanwhile, that incongruous British community, the rebellious Belorussian Bedlam, behaved worse than ever now that they were being nervously managed by the philosopher of utlitarianism on a part-time basis.

Potemkin had not paid them yet. Dr Debraw, gardener Roebuck and butler–factotum Benson were now in open rebellion. Many of the British clearly enjoyed a traditional expatriate life of abandoned debauchery. Soon they began to perish prolifically, a misfortune that Samuel said had more to do with their intemperate lifestyle than with the unwholesome climate. Debraw had just been made physician-general to the army when he died, possibly a mercy for the Russian soldiers. The rest either expired or were dispersed.⁷¹

‘We have been in hourly expectation of the Prince on his way to his Governments for a considerable time…’, wrote Jeremy Bentham, but, as so often, the Prince was always delayed.⁷² A few days later, Potemkin’s niece– mistress Countess Skavronskaya stopped at Krichev on her way to Petersburg from Naples and told them that ‘the Prince of Princes had given up his intentions of coming’.⁷³ Some biographers have claimed that Potemkin and Jeremy Bentham had long philosophical discussions,⁷⁴ but there is no account of such a meeting. If they had met, it is hard to believe that Jeremy would not have written about it.^*7

Finally, after more than a year in Potemkin’s world, Jeremy Bentham departed through Poland, staying in lots of ‘Jew inns’. Dirty houses and filthy animals had their consolations: gorgeous Jewesses. Here’s a typical entry: ‘Pretty Jewess, hogs in the stable…fowls free in the house.’⁷⁵ The philosopher even managed a singular compliment for a travelling Englishman of his century: one household of Jewesses were so magnificent that ‘the whole family, fine flesh and blood, [were] not inferior to English’ (author’s italics).

—

The estate flourished: in Krichev, Potemkin had taken advice from his Swiss medical adviser Dr Behr on reducing mortality, possibly by inoculation. The male serf population had risen from 14,000 to 21,000 in just a few years.⁷⁶ Its estate and financial accounts show its importance to the Kherson fleet, while Bentham’s unpublished letters in Potemkin’s archives reveal how the Black Sea cities used Krichev as their supply yard. In the two years and eight months up to August 1785, Bentham’s enterprise sent Kherson rigging, sailcloth and riverboats worth 120,000 roubles and cable and canvas worth 90,000 roubles. In 1786, Bentham delivered 11,000 roubles’s worth of baidaks. When Samuel had moved on, its canvas production trebled, its ships’ tackle doubled. Many of the factories were highly profitable by 1786: the brandy distillery made 25,000 roubles per annum; the 172 looms made another 25,000 roubles; and the ropewalk produced 1,000 poods or sixteen tons a week, creating maybe 12,000 roubles.⁷⁷ However, profit and loss accounts meant little to Potemkin: his sole criterion was what brought glory and power to the Empire – which meant his army, navy and cities. By this criterion, this imperial arsenal and factory was an outstanding success.

Suddenly, in 1787, the Prince sold the entire complex, for 900,000 roubles, in order to purchase even bigger estates in Poland. He had received the estate for nothing and, though he had invested a lot, it is unlikely that hiring English artisans cost anything close to that. As always with the Machiavellian Prince, there were grand political reasons for the sudden sale of what he had built up so carefully. He moved some of the factories to his estates in Kremenchuk, leaving others to continue under new management. When the estate was sold, Krichev’s Jews tried to raise a purse to buy the estate themselves ‘to enable Sam[uel Bentham] to buy up this town’. But nothing came of it.

This was the end of the Krichev adventure for Jeremy Bentham and his British recruits. But it was far from the end for Potemkin’s two favourite Englishmen – Samuel Bentham and William Gould. Both were to play large roles in his future. The Prince had so far used Sam Bentham as a Siberian mining consultant, factory-manager, shipbuilder, colonel of Musketeers, agronomist and inventor. Now he was to bring his barges up the river on a special mission and then become a quartermaster, artillery expert, fighting naval officer, Siberian instructor and Chinese–Alaskan trader, in that order.

Gould, his team constantly increasing with more experts from England, became an indispensable part of the Prince’s entourage – the harbinger of Potemkin himself, arriving with tools, workmen and trees, a few weeks before the great man himself. In the coming war, none of Potemkin’s peripatetic headquarters was complete without a Gould garden. But his masterpiece was to be the Winter Garden at the Taurida Palace.

—

Serenissimus occasionally neglected his British guests because of the necessity of his juggling Petersburg politics with southern enterprise. At the very beginning of Samuel Bentham’s adventure, when he was travelling with Potemkin on the way back from the Crimea, Potemkin promised to accompany him to Krichev to decide what to do there. They stopped in Kremenchuk, where news reached Potemkin from Petersburg that changed everything.

Without a word of goodbye, the Prince left Kremenchuk with the ‘utmost expedition’, taking just one servant with him.⁷⁸ Only one person in the world could make Potemkin drop everything like that.

Skip Notes

*1 Potemkin took Reginald Pole Carew on a tour of his industrial holdings in 1781, including his glass and brick factories near Schlüsselburg, another glass factory near the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, and his iron foundry twenty miles outside Petersburg on his Eschenbaum estate, which was run by an Englishman, Mr Hill. Pole Carew also visited Krichev and Potemkin’s other estates down the Dnieper, and suggested founding an English colony on a formerly Zaporogian island where Potemkin later settled immigrants.

*2 Card games followed political fashions. For example, the Comte de Ségur explains in his Mémoires how in Paris the faro of high aristocracy gave way to English whist, representing moderate liberty as explained by Montesquieu, but when the American War showed that Kings could be defied, ‘boston’ became the fashion.

*3 Alupka is the remarkable Crimea palace built in a mixture of Scottish baronial, Arabesque and Gothic architecture by Prince Mikhail Vorontsov and his wife Lise, who was Potemkin’s great-niece. It is now a museum. See Epilogue.

*4 We can follow some of Gould’s adventures in the archives: in 1785, he is paid 1,453 roubles for a tool needed in the Crimea; the next year, 500 roubles for gardeners coming from England to join the team. In 1786/7, Gould headed from Petersburg to the Crimea with 200 roubles for the journey and 225 for his carriage. Then he joined the Prince in Moldavia during the war, travelling with him to Dubossary in 1789 (800 roubles) and the next year to Jassy (650 roubles).

*5 The bitchy Horace Walpole laughed at the appropriateness of the subject since two tsars had been killed, at least one strangled, to secure Catherine’s crown.

*6 Potemkin’s paintings were admired in the Hermitage by Parkinson in 1792. None of the three Reynoldes is now on display in the Hermitage, but they are exhibited abroad. When the author searched for them in 1998, they were in a dusty corridor used as a storeroom, leaning forlornly against the wall.

*7 Potemkin may never have got the chance to encounter Jeremy Bentham. But we can: he rests, stuffed, pale and desiccated but clearly recognizable, his ‘auto-icon’, in the corridors of University College, London.