23
THE MAGICAL THEATRE
Louis XIV would have been jealous of his sister Catherine II, or he would have married her…The Empress received me…She recalled to my mind a thousand things that monarchs alone can remember for their memory is always excellent.
Prince de Ligne
On 7 December 1786, Francisco de Miranda, aged thirty-seven, a cultured, cynical and rakish revolutionary of dubious Creole nobility, who had been cashiered from the Spanish army and was travelling from Constantinople to raise support for a free Venezuela, awaited Potemkin in Kherson. The whole town was preparing for the arrival of the Prince, who was on his final tour of inspection before the visit of Catherine II and the Holy Roman Emperor to his territories. Everyone was waiting. The cannons were primed, the troops were drilled. There were rumours that he was on his way, but still the ‘mysterious godhead’, as Miranda called him, did not come. ‘No one knew where he would be going next.’ Waiting for Serenissimus was one of the hallmarks of Potemkin’s power. Nothing could be done without him. The more powerful he became, the more everything stopped in anticipation of his arrival. Potemkin had to be welcomed like a tsar or at least a member of the imperial family – on Catherine’s orders. His whims were unpredictable, his travelling so swift that he could descend on a town without warning – hence everything had to be kept in a state of the highest readiness. ‘You don’t ride,’ Catherine teased him. ‘You fly.’1
Twenty days later, on 28 December, Miranda was still waiting. Then at sundown ‘the much desired Prince Potemkin’ arrived to the boom of cannons. Soldiers and officials went to pay their respects to the ‘favourite idol’.2 Miranda was taken by his friends to the Prince’s exotic Court, inhabited by all the ‘cretins and respectable people’ Kherson could hold. ‘My goodness, what a bunch of sycophants and crooked rascals,’ wrote Miranda, ‘but anyway what most amused me was the variety of costumes that could be seen there – Cossacks, Greeks, Jews’ – and Caucasian ambassadors in uniforms à la Prusse. Suddenly a giant emerged, bowing here and there, not speaking to anyone. The Venezuelan was introduced to the Prince as a Spanish count (which he was not). Potemkin said little – but his curiosity was aroused.
On 31 December, Potemkin’s aide summoned Miranda, only for the Venezuelan to find Potemkin taking tea with Prince Charles de Nassau-Siegen.3 ‘Give me strength!’, thought Miranda at the sight of Nassau, whom he knew from Spain and Constantinople, and regarded with the disdain that only one adventurer can feel for another. They had both led tumultuous lives. Miranda had fought for the Spanish as far as afield as Algiers and Jamaica, and knew Washington and Jefferson from his years in America. Nassau-Siegen, aged forty-two, impoverished heir to a tiny principality, become a soldier of fortune at fifteen, joined Bougainville’s expedition of global circumnavigation during which he killed a tiger, tried to make himself king of Ouidah in west Africa,4 and made love to the Queen of Tahiti. On his return, he commanded the unfortunate Franco-Spanish assault on Gibraltar in 1782 and launched a raid on Jersey. Ruthless and reckless in war and intrigue, Nassau moved east. He wooed Princess Sangushko, a Polish widow. Each thought the other was rich. Once they were married, both discovered the other was not as advertised. But it turned out to be a happy marriage of strong characters and they impressed the salons of Warsaw by keeping fifty bears on their Podolian estate to repel Cossacks. Nassau-Siegen had recently become Potemkin’s travelling companion when King Stanislas-Augustus sent him to ask the Prince to bring his Polish clientele to order. But Nassau also hoped to inveigle himself into Potemkin’s favour to win trading rights in Kherson.5
The Prince was interrogating Miranda about South America when Ribas, his Neapolitan courtier, rushed in and announced that his mistress had arrived. She called herself ‘Countess’ Sevres, but ‘whatever her origins’, wrote Miranda, ‘she is a whore.’ That did not matter: everyone rushed to court her. Her companion was Mademoiselle Guibald, the governess of Potemkin’s nieces and now the itinerant manageress of his southern seraglio. Potemkin kissed his mistress and sat her on his right – ‘he sleeps with her without the slightest ceremony’, noted Miranda. A quintet began playing Boccherini. Over the next few days, the exuberant Potemkin, holding court at ‘Countess’ Sevres’s apartments in his Palace, could not be without the company of his two new friends, Miranda and Nassau-Siegen. Both, in their different ways, were remarkable – Nassau-Siegen was known as the ‘paladin’ of the age and Miranda was the father of South American liberation, so we are lucky that the latter recorded his experiences in his sceptical and unprejudiced diaries. Potemkin even prepared them a fricassee with his own hands while discussing Algerian pirates and Polish aspirations. Miranda was pleased that the courtiers were ‘exploding’ with jealousy at this new friendship.6
The Prince invited Nassau and Miranda to accompany him on his lightning inspection of the imperial route. Potemkin knew that the success or failure of Catherine’s journey would either make him unassailable – or ruin him. The cabinets of Europe were watching. England, Prussia and the Sublime Porte stirred uneasily as Potemkin created new cities and fleets to threaten Constantinople. The Empress’s Crimean trip had been delayed because of plague, but there was always a suspicion that it could not take place because nothing in the south had been done – ‘there are people who supposed’, Cobenzl told Joseph, ‘that all necessary to make the tour cannot be ready’.7
At 10 p.m. on 5 January 1787, Potemkin, Miranda and Nassau set off, crossing frozen rivers at high speed – three of the most extraordinary men of their epoch in one carriage. They galloped all night, thrice changing horses, stopping at a house of Potemkin’s on the way, to reach Perekop, the gateway to the Crimea, at 8 a.m., having covered 160 miles in twenty hours.8 They crossed short distances in a roomy travelling coach, but since it was now midwinter they often used kibitkas (light carriages) mounted on sleighs – their wheels were removed – to glide swiftly over the snowy steppes, almost alone. Travelling in a kibitka was like lying in a space capsule: ‘they are exactly like cradles, the head having windows to the front’, Lady Craven recalled. ‘I can sit, or lie, at length, and feel in one like an overgrown baby, comfortably defended from the cold by pillows and blankets.’ The rough terrain and high speed made it even more risky. Passengers were subjected to continuous ‘shaking and violent thumps…the hardest head might be broken. I was overturned twice.’ But the Russian postillions thought nothing of it: they just got silently off their horses, set the carriage up again and ‘never ask if the carriage is hurt’.9 They would then hurtle away again.
The Prince inspected the Crimea, where Miranda saw the new fleet, troops, cities and plantations. He admired the palaces prepared for the Empress at Simferopol, Bakhchisaray, Sebastopol and Karasubazaar, and the English gardens that William Gould was laying out around them. When they arrived at Sebastopol, the officers insisted on giving a ball for the Prince, who blushed when a toast was given in his honour. Miranda laughed at some of the officers, who ‘jumped and hopped about’ like ‘Parisian petit maîtres’. They then inspected Inkerman before galloping back to Simferopol, where the travellers went hunting for two days as Potemkin worked.10
Potemkin was accompanied everywhere by Tartar horsemen in regular cavalry squadrons: ‘fifty escorted the carriage at every moment’, Nassau-Siegen told his wife, ‘and the Tartars of every locality where we passed arrived from every direction so the countryside was covered in men who, running, from every direction, gave it an air of war.’ The ‘paladin’ thought it was all ‘superb’.11 Miranda also noticed how Potemkin carefully cultivated all the local Islamic muftis in each town. Serenissimus was accompanied by his court artist, Ivanov, who painted as they travelled, and music – ranging from string quartets to Ukrainian choirs – played wherever they stopped. One day Miranda found Potemkin admiring ‘a very famous pearl necklace embellished with diamonds’.12 The Venezuelan had never seen a ‘more noble or beautiful adornment in my life’. It was indeed so valuable that when it was bought from Mack, the Viennese Court jewellers, the identity of the buyer was kept secret. Even Joseph II wanted to know who had bought it. Finally Cobenzl revealed the secret to his Emperor: Potemkin was planning to present it to the Empress on her tour.13
The three travellers took tea at the English dairy run for Potemkin by Mr Henderson and his two dubious ‘nieces’, recruited by the Benthams, then headed for the vineyards of Soudak. He presented a vineyard to Nassau, who at once ordered vines from Constantinople. The soldiers they inspected impressed Miranda – the Kiev and Taurida Regiments ‘could not have been better’. Then the party visited Potemkin’s mint at the old slave-market at Kaffa, run by his Jewish merchant Zeitlin, and his new town of Theodosia.
Serenissimus occupied every night and every carriage-ride with political and artistic discussions with his companions, ranging from the virtues of Murillo to the sins of the Inquisition. The three companions in the Potemkin carriage got on well, perhaps too well, so the Prince entertained himself by provoking a row between Nassau and Miranda. Potemkin baited the Franco-German Nassau by attacking the French for their ingratitude to Russia. The Venezuelan joined in. Nassau was enraged and told Miranda that Spanish women were all prostitutes and most were infected with venereal diseases. Indeed when he met the notorious Duchess of Alba, a Spaniard immediately warned him that she was ‘infested’. This incensed Miranda, and the two argued over whose nation was more poxed. No doubt Potemkin enjoyed all this hugely and the journey passed all the more quickly.14
On the 20th, Potemkin’s party set off across the steppes back to Kherson: as usual they travelled all night through the isthmus and rested for breakfast at Perekop, where Miranda admired one of Potemkin’s new breed of lambs. It was so cold, the travellers’ faces were frozen. ‘They rubbed snow and fat on them which is the treatment used here.’ Bauer, Potemkin’s adjutant, awaited them. He had made it from Tsarskoe Selo in seven and a half days to announce that the Empress was on her way to rendezvous with Potemkin at Kiev.15
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At 11 o’clock on the freezing morning of 7 January, fourteen carriages, 124 sledges (and forty reserves) set off from Tsarskoe Selo to the sound of cannon salutes. Five hundred and sixty horses awaited them at each post. Catherine’s entourage of twenty-two consisted of her senior courtiers and Ségur, Cobenzl and Fitzherbert, the ambassadors of France, Austria and England. All were wrapped in bearskins and sable bonnets. They were accompanied by hundreds of servants, including twenty footmen, thirty washerwomen, silver polishers, apothecaries, doctors and blackamoors.
The Empress’s carriage, drawn by ten horses and lined with cushioned benches and carpets, was so cavernous that a man could stand up in it. It was a six-seater. Every seat mattered.*1 On that first day, it bore the Empress herself, ‘Redcoat’ Mamonov, Lady-in-Waiting Protosova, Master of the Horse Naryshkin, Chief Chamberlain Shuvalov and Cobenzl. The key to the bone-jolting royal travel of those days was to fight boredom without offending diplomacy. So, every other day, Shuvalov and Naryshkin swapped places with Ségur and Fitzherbert,16 whom Catherine called her ‘Pocket Ministers’.17 Each knew that they were about to witness the spectacle of a lifetime.
When it got dark at 3 p.m., the carriages and sledges rushed along icy lanes through the cold winter nights illuminated by bonfires of cypresses, birch and fir, on both sides of the road, to form ‘avenues of fire brighter than daylight’. Potemkin had ordered them to be stoked night and day. The Empress tried to follow the same routine as she did in Petersburg, rising at 6 a.m., then working. She breakfasted with her ‘Pocket Ministers’ before resuming the journey at 9 a.m., halting at 2 p.m. for dinner, then travelling until 7 p.m. Everywhere there were palaces prepared for her: their stoves were so piping-hot that Ségur was ‘more alarmed at the heat…than the cold outside’. There were cards and conversation until 9 p.m., when the Empress withdrew to work until bedtime. Ségur enjoyed the experience, though none of his risqué jokes were tolerated; the melancholy Fitzherbert, feeling liverish and leaving a Russian mistress behind, was bored. He complained to Jeremy Bentham about ‘the same furniture, same victuals’: it was ‘only St Petersburg carried up and down the empire’.18 While she settled down with ‘Redcoat’ in her palace, the ambassadors were as likely to find themselves in a fetid peasant cottage as in a manorhouse.19
Heading south-west towards Kiev, the foreigners observed traditional Russia: ‘a quarter of an hour before Her Majesty comes up to them’, the peasants ‘lay themselves flat on the ground and rise again a quarter of an hour after we have passed’.20 Crowds gathered to welcome the Empress but, like Frederick the Great, she disdained their admiration: ‘They’d come out in crowds to watch a bear too.’21 The Empress passed through Potemkin’s estate, Krichev, and Jeremy Bentham saw her progress down the main street, ‘edged with branches of firs and other evergreens, and illuminated with tar barrels’.22 There were balls every day, everywhere: ‘that’s how we travel, she boasted to Grimm.23
On 29 January, she arrived at Kiev, where the Court was to reside for three months until the ice on the Dnieper melted. A ‘multitude of travellers from all parts of Europe’ awaited her – including Ligne.24 The roads to Kiev were jammed with grandees. ‘I have never in my life met with so much gaiety, so much charm and wit,’ wrote a Polish noblewoman on her way to court Catherine and Potemkin.*2 ‘Our little dinners in these squalid Jewish inns are quite exquisite…If one closes one’s eyes, one imagines oneself in Paris.’25
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Catherine received this letter from Potemkin in the Crimea: ‘Here the greenery in the meadows is starting to break through. I think the flowers are coming soon…I pray to God that this land will be lucky enough to please you, my foster-mother. That is the source of all my happiness. Goodbye, my dear Matushka.’26
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Accompanied by music and the bickering of his companions about national venereal customs, Potemkin travelled day and night, ‘at the speed of the devil’ according to Nassau, to reach Kremenchuk.27 Regardless of the vast responsibilities on his shoulders, with emperors, kings and half the courtiers in Europe converging to view his works, the Prince appeared to spend his days listening to concerts. ‘We had music and more music,’ marvelled Miranda – hornplayers one day, a Sarti oratorio the next, a Ukrainian choir, then more Boccherini quartets. But beneath the nonchalance Potemkin must have been working and biting his nails like never before. Not everything was perfect: two days after Catherine arrived in Kiev, he inspected ten squadrons of Dragoons. ‘It was horrible,’ noted Miranda. ‘PP was not very happy.’ Another squadron of Cuirassiers near Poltava was too much of a mess to be inspected at all.
As the Empress waited in Kiev, the Prince’s arrangements accelerated with the unpredictability that was his only rhythm. He ordered Nassau and Miranda to meet the Empress with him. On 4 February, after inspecting troops and attending parties, Potemkin met the exiled Moldavian Hospodar, Alexander Mavrocordato, who had just been deposed by the Turks contrary to the spirit of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi – a reminder of the rising tension between Russia and the Sublime Porte.
Miranda rushed to get courtier’s suits made. When he got home, he found his servant had procured him a Russian girl ‘who owes nothing in bed to the most lascivious Andalusian’. Next morning, an adjutant announced that Potemkin had left in a kibitka at 5 a.m. ‘without saying anything to anybody’. At 3 p.m., Nassau and Miranda set off in pursuit, each in their own kibitka capsule. They never caught up of course, because no one had reduced the hours of eighteenth-century travel to such a fine art as Potemkin. The snow was soft. The sledges got stuck or overturned. New horses were ordered. There were delays of hours. When Miranda arrived at the Kiev customs two days later, he found that Nassau had commandeered Potemkin’s messages – typical of that unscrupulous intriguer. ‘What a mess,’ wrote Miranda.28
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Kiev, on the right bank of the Dnieper, was a ‘Graeco-Scythian’ vision of ‘ruins, convents, churches, unfinished palaces’, an ancient Russian city fallen on hard times.29 When everyone had arrived, there were three luxurious tableaux: first, ‘the eye was astonished to see, all at one time, a sumptuous court, a conquering Empress, a rich and quarrelsome nobility, proud and luxurious princes and grandees’ and all the peoples of the Empire: Don Cossacks, Georgian princes, Kirghiz chieftains and ‘savage Kalmyks, true image of the Huns’. Ségur called it a ‘magical theatre that seemed to confuse and mix antiquity with modern times, civilization and barbarism’.30
Cobenzl’s house was like a gentleman’s club for the foreigners, though the other two ‘Pocket Ministers’ each had a little mansion of his own. There were French, Germans, lots of Poles and some Americans, including the diminutive and aptly named Lewis Littlepage, recently appointed chamberlain to Stanislas-Augustus, King of Poland. Aged twenty-five, this Virginian gentleman and friend of George Washington had fought the British at Gibraltar and Minorca, and was an enthusiastic amateur actor–producer, who staged the Polish première of the Barber of Seville at Nassau’s house. Now he became Stanislas-Augustus’ eyes at the Court of Potemkin.31 The doyen of these foreigners was the Prince de Ligne – ‘affectionate with his equals, popular with his inferiors, familiar with princes and even sovereigns, he put everyone at their ease’. Not everyone was so charmed by charm itself: Miranda found him a nauseating flatterer.32
Then there was the Court of Potemkin. That coenobite moved directly into the massive monastery of the Caves, half-church, half-fortress, a sepulchral medieval labyrinth of subterranean halls, churches with twenty-one domes, and troglodyte cells, many of them cut into the caves beneath the city. Seventy-five saints lay undecayed in silk, cool in their catacombs. When Potemkin received his courtiers there, it seemed ‘one entered an audience with the vizier of Constantinople, Baghdad or Cairo. Silence and a sort of fear ruled there.’ The Prince appeared at Court in his marshal’s uniform, clanking with medals and diamonds, laced, powdered and buckled; but at his monastery he stretched out on a divan in his favourite pelisse, thick hair uncombed, pretending to be ‘too busy playing chess to notice’ his Court of Polish princelings and Georgian tsareviches. Ségur worried he would be mocked for exposing the dignity of the King of France to such hauteur, ‘so this was the way I played it…’. When Potemkin did not even raise his eyes from the chessboard, Ségur approached him, took his leonine head in his hands, embraced him and sat down casually beside him on the sofa. In private, Serenissimus dropped his haughtiness and was his old cheerful self,33 surrounded by nieces Branicka and Skavronskaya, Nassau, Miranda and his composer Sarti, ‘dressed as a ridiculous macaroni’. He cherished his dear friend Ségur ‘like a child’.*3
Kiev became the Russian capital. Even Ligne was amazed at the sights: ‘Good Heavens! What a retinue! What noise! What a quantity of diamonds, gold stars and orders! How many chains, ribbons, turbans and red caps brimmed with furs or sharp-pointed!’34 Potemkin took his guests, Miranda and Nassau, on a roving debauch of card games, dinners and dances. The nieces were more than ever treated like grand duchesses: at Branicka’s house, where ambassadors and Russian ministers gathered, Miranda could barely believed the ‘wealth and magnificence’ of the Polish ‘kinglets’ like Potocki and Sapieha.35
On 14 February, Potemkin had Miranda presented to the Empress. She was taken with his machismo, questioning him about the Inquisition, of which he claimed to be a victim. From then on, Miranda was included in Catherine’s intimate circle as well as Potemkin’s. Soon he was rather blasé. ‘Whist with the usual people,’ he wrote. Nassau complained to his wife that the stakes were a ‘bit expensive – 200 roubles’. What did he expect if he played with the Empress and Serenissimus? Most evenings ended in relaxed decadence at Lev Naryshkin’s – just like in Petersburg.36
There was the usual fascination with Catherine’s and Potemkin’s sex lives. The ambassadors scribbled reports back to their Courts and all the travellers recorded anything they could glean. Catherine was always accompanied by Mamonov, who ‘owes his fortune to Prince Potemkin and knows it’, according to Nassau, but this did not prevent false rumours about Miranda. ‘Nothing escaped his penetration, not even the Empress of all the Russias,’ claimed a young, envious American diplomat, Stephen Sayre, ‘a mortifying declaration for me to make who was 21 months in her capital without ever making myself acquainted with the internal parts of her extensive and well known dominions.’37
The soi-disant ‘Countess’ Sevres, escorted by Mademoiselle Guibald, began the Kiev sojourn in possession of Potemkin’s ‘momentary adoration’. Then there were his two nieces, but Sevres was soon replaced as ‘favourite sultana’ by a Naryshkina,38 who was admired by Miranda at one of Naryshkin’s fêtes. The Empress dined there. ‘There were games and music with dancing.’ Catherine played whist with Potemkin, Ségur and Mamonov and then summoned Miranda to discuss the architecture of Granada. When she left as usual at 10 p.m., the real fun began. Naryshkina danced a Cossack jig then a Russian one, ‘which was more lascivious’, thought Miranda, ‘than our fandango…what a good dancer…what a soft movement of the shoulders and back! She could raise the dead!’
Serenissimus evidently shared Miranda’s admiration for her resurrectory talents for he spent ‘an hour tête-à-tête with Mademoiselle M. Nari…to persuade her of some political affair’. Miranda could hear her ‘giving sights’ and exclaiming ‘if that was true!’ to Potemkin’s stories.39 A dubious source also claimed that Potemkin pounced on Zakhar Chernyshev’s daughter right outside Catherine’s rooms.*4 The girl screamed, waking up Catherine. This is unlikely since he was hardly short of female company.40
The Prince’s entourage, including Miranda and Nassau, lodged with him at the Monastery – but none behaved like monks. Kiev buzzed with merriment – a bonanza for the whores of the Ukraine. Miranda and Kiselev, one of Potemkin’s adjutants, ‘went to the house of a Jewish woman of Polish descent who had very good girls and offered the best tonight’, but when they returned after the afternoon at Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky’s, ‘I only found a very average Polish woman.’ Miranda was surprised that even the girls in Ukrainian provinces wore French fashions: ‘God damn it! How far has hellish Gallic frivolity contaminated the human race?’ There was such competition for Kiev’s overworked horizontales between different courtiers that, just as Miranda and Potemkin’s adjutant turned up, Catherine’s young chamberlains arrived in force and hogged all the girls. Miranda was furious: he took his pleasures seriously. Finally he found his Polish-Jewish procuress, but, when he tried to explain to the pander what services Kiselev desired, the Russian officer too became angry. ‘Oh, how difficult it is for men to act liberally in matters of love and sexual preference!’, grumbled Miranda. The two Lotharios had better luck a few days later at a house with an eighteen-year-old courtesan and her maid. Kiselev tackled the maid. Miranda ‘tried to conquer the mistress who in the end agreed on three ducats (she wanted ten)’. He stayed happily ‘with my nymph in bed…she was very good and I enjoyed it’, but perhaps not as much as he wished: ‘she did not let me put it in’. Early next morning: ‘Holy Thursday. We attended a solemn mass in the Church of Pechersky with the Empress present…’. Such, from Polish-Jewish trolls to solemn imperial mass, was life in Kiev.41
There was seething intrigue behind the pleasure-seeking. The ambassadors tried to learn what was really happening, but ‘political secrets remained concealed between Catherine, Prince Potemkin and Count Bezborodko’. When Ségur announced that in faraway Paris Louis XVI had called the fatal Assembly of Notables, the first step towards the French Revolution, the Empress congratulated him. ‘Everybody’s mind was secretly stirred up by liberal sentiments, the desire for reform.’ Catherine and Potemkin talked reform but understood the ominous signs in Paris. ‘We’re not impressed,’ Catherine told Grimm, promising that Potemkin would send him some ‘Dervish music’.42
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Icy realities were manifested in the presence there of the richest and most restless of Poland’s overmighty ‘kinglets’. ‘Half Poland is here,’ Catherine told Grimm. The Empress was in the process of arranging to meet her ex-lover from the 1750s, King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland. Potemkin decided to see him first in order to discuss the agenda for the summit with Catherine. Serenissimus was continuing to cultivate Poland as a personal insurance policy as well as increasingly conducting Russian policy there. He had that special Smolensk szlachta sympathy for Poland from his childhood, but his two immediate aims were to build up a personal position as a Polish magnate and to win Polish support for the coming war against the Turks.
Polish affairs were so complex and unstable that Potemkin remained uncommitted to any one policy, preferring to move in mysterious and flexible ways. He conducted at least three policies simultaneously. He continued to run the pro-Russian Polish party, which was hostile to King Stanislas-Augustus, around his nephew Branicki and a camarilla of magnates.43
In late 1786, he began to pursue a second policy – the purchase of huge estates in Poland itself, made possible by his indigenat of 1775. (He had sold some Russian estates in 1783 and was about to sell the Krichev complex.) Now he told Miranda that he had just bought Polish estates that extended over 300,000 acres and cost two million roubles.44 The rumour went round Kiev that these estates contained 300 villages and 60,000 souls.45 In late 1786, the Prince made a complicated deal with Prince Ksawery Lubomirski to buy the massive Smila and Meschiricz estates on the right bank of the Dnieper in the triangle of the Polish Palatinate of Kiev that jutted into Russian territory. Smila alone was so extensive that, at his death, it contained 112,000 male souls, giving it a total population the size of a small eighteenth-century city. It had its own baronial Court, its own judicial system and even a private army.46
He bought the estates with his own money, but it all derived from the Treasury in one way or another and he regarded this purchase as an imperial, as well as a private, enterprise. Lubomirski was already one of the main contractors of timber for Potemkin’s Black Sea Fleet, so he was buying his own suppliers to create a semi-private, semi-imperial conglomerate.47 But there was more to it than that: the deal made Potemkin a Polish magnate in his own right – the foundations of his own private principality outside Russia. It was also a form of privatized annexation of Polish territory – and a Trojan Horse that would give him the right to penetrate Polish institutions. Catherine had tried to give Potemkin the Duchy of Courland and the new Kingdom of Dacia, if not the crown of Poland itself. ‘From his newly bought lands in Poland,’ she commented in Kiev to her secretary, ‘Potemkin will perhaps make a tertium quid independent of both Russia and Poland.’ She understood the danger of Paul’s accession to her dear consort – but it also made her uneasy. Later that year, he explained to her that he had bought these lands ‘to become a landowner and to gain the right to enter both their affairs and their military command’.48 Like everything connected with Poland, the Smila purchase proved to be a quagmire, igniting a series of court cases and family arguments among the Lubomirskis that embroiled Potemkin in four years of negotiations and litigation.49
King Stanislas-Augustus represented the third strand of Potemkin’s Polish policy. While undermining him with Branicki and his land purchases, Potemkin had always had a soft spot for Stanislas-Augustus, that powerless aesthete and overly sincere patron of the Enlightenment: their correspondence was warmer than just diplomatic courtesy, at least on Potemkin’s side. The Prince believed that a treaty with Stanislas-Augustus would buy Polish support against the Turks and keep Poland in the Russian sphere of influence and out of the greedy paws of Prussia. Personally, Potemkin could then command Polish troops as a magnate. All this could be most easily achieved through King Stanislas-Augustus.
The Poles themselves were in Kiev to undermine their own king before the meeting with Catherine, and win Serenissimus’ favour.50 ‘These first-rank Polish are humble and sycophantic before Prince Potemkin,’ observed Miranda at a dinner at the Branickis’. Politics and adultery were the undercurrents, as all the Poles ‘tricked themselves, and were tricked, or tricked others, all very amiable, less so it is true than their wives…’. Indeed their entire display was to raise their prestige in the eyes of Potemkin, ‘but his glance is hard to catch’, joked Ligne, ‘since he has only one eye and is short-sighted’.51
Potemkin demonstrated his power by favouring one Pole and humiliating another. Everyone was jealous of Potemkin’s attention. Ligne, Nassau and Lewis Littlepage intrigued with the Poles on behalf of their masters. Branicki envied Nassau, because the latter was staying with Potemkin – and therefore was ‘master of the field of battle.’52 Branicki and Felix Potocki tried to persuade Potemkin that Stanislas-Augustus opposed his land acquisitions, which had understandably caused some unease in Warsaw.53 Alexandra Branicka was already so close to the Empress that Polish gossip claimed she was her natural daughter.54 The Prince was irritated by Branicki’s bungling intrigues, so there was a ‘terrible scene’, which made Alexandra ill.55 Yet he had Branicki and Felix Potocki received warmly by the Empress, while she ‘did not even cast a glance’ at his critics, Ignacy Potocki and Prince Sapieha.56
Even Miranda managed to become caught up in this Polish game. He greeted the Prince in front of some Polish magnates without standing up. Miranda should have known that royalty, of whom Potemkin was by now almost one, are touchy about etiquette. Strangers could never take Potemkin’s favour for granted. Rumours that Miranda was neither a Spanish count nor a colonel may have also played some part in this cooling. Potemkin gave him the icy treatment.57
In early March, the Prince, accompanied by Nassau, Branicki and Stackelberg, the Russian Ambassador to Warsaw, travelled the twenty-eight miles to Chwastow to meet the King of Poland, who nervously awaited his rendezvous with Catherine after so many years.58 Potemkin wore the uniform of a Polish szlachta of the Palatinate of Bratslav and his Polish orders. He treated the King, accompanied by Littlepage, like his own monarch. The two men agreed on Potemkin’s suggestion of a Russo-Polish treaty against the Ottomans. Serenissimus let Stackelberg sound out Stanislas-Augustus on his plans to set himself up in a feudal principality at Smila. The King responded that he wanted Russian agreement on reforming the Polish constitution. Potemkin denounced Ignacy Potocki as ‘a scelerat’ – a fossil, Felix Potocki was ‘a fool’, but Branicki was really not a bad fellow.59 Potemkin was ‘enchanted’ by the King60 – ‘for at least a moment’.61 The coming meeting with Catherine was confirmed.
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Back in Kiev two days later, Miranda awaited Potemkin’s return nervously. But the Prince, whose sulks never lasted long, greeted him like a long-lost friend: ‘it seems a century since we last saw each other’, he boomed.62 As Catherine’s departure got closer, it was time to leave Miranda behind. The Empress, via Mamonov, offered him Russian service, but he revealed his hopes for a Venezuelan revolt against Spain. Catherine and Potemkin were sympathetic to this anti-Bourbon project. ‘If the Inquisition is so necessary, then they should appoint Miranda as Inquisitor,’ joked Potemkin. Catherine offered him the use of all Russian missions abroad and he cheekily requested 10,000 roubles of credit. Mamonov told Miranda that Serenissimus would have to approve, more evidence of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s near equality. Potemkin agreed. On 22 April, the future (if short-lived) dictator of Venezuela took his leave of Empress and Prince. The Spanish caught up with Francisco de Miranda in the end. Later that year in Petersburg, the two Bourbon ambassadors threatened to withdraw unless the fake Count–Colonel was expelled. In the end, he never got the full 10,000 roubles – but he did keep in contact with Potemkin: the archives reveal that he sent him a telescope from London as a present.63
Just as everyone was getting exceptionally tired of Kiev, which Catherine called ‘abominable’,64 artillery salvoes announced that the ice had melted and the show could begin. At midday on 22 April 1787, the Empress embarked on her galley in the most luxurious fleet ever seen on a great river.
Skip Notes
*1 The Empress’s trip was the cause of another row with her Heir: she wanted to take the little princes, Alexander and Constantine, with her. Grand Duke Paul bitterly objected: he wished to come on the trip as well, but Catherine was not going to allow ‘Die schwere Bagage’ to spoil her glory. Paul even appealed desperately to Potemkin to stop the children going, a humiliating recognition of his power. Potemkin probably helped the children stay with the parents, a sign of kindness overcoming expediency; but Alexander fell ill, which actually solved the problem.
*2 This was Countess Mniszech, née Urszula Zamoyska, the King of Poland’s niece. Stanislas-Augustus claimed that Potemkin had proposed marriage to her back in 1775. For obvious reasons, this was unlikely. Now Potemkin, who evidently bore no ill feelings, had her decorated by Catherine, along with Alexandra Branicka.
*3 Once in this intimate circle, Ségur noticed that Potemkin kept slipping away to a back room. When he tried to follow, the nieces detained him with ‘charming cajolery’. Finally he escaped to discover the Oriental scene of a room filled with jewels and forbidden merchandise, surrounded by merchants and onlookers. At the centre of it was his own valet Evrard, who had been caught red-handed smuggling and whose goods were thus being sold off, with Potemkin doubtless getting the best of the gems. The highly embarrassed Ségur sacked his valet on the spot, but the nieces, who were evidently delighted with the latest fashions from Paris, dissuaded him. ‘You had better be nice to him,’ said Potemkin, ‘since by a strange chance, you find yourself to be his…accomplice.’ His valet may have been caught with contraband, but the Ambassador of the Most Christian Majesty had clearly been set up for one of Potemkin’s jokes.
*4 This resembles Lord Palmerston’s attempt to ravish one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting at Windsor – except that Catherine was probably as amused as the Queen was not.