Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

So the last setpiece scene of the 'farce of the Marquis de Pugachev' was prepared in the Bolotnaia Square below the Kremlin. On 10 January 1775, the crowds gathered, keen to witness the dismemberment of the living 'monster'. Pugachev, 'besmeared all over with black', was drawn in 'a kind of dung- cart', in which he was fastened to a stake. There were two priests with him and the executioner stood behind. Two gleaming axes lay on the block. 'Not a trace of fear' was discernible on his serene face 'in the hour approaching dissolution'. The 'monster' climbed up the ladder to the scaffold, undressed himself and stretched out, ready for the executioner to begin his carving.

Something 'strange and unexpected' happened. The executioner swung his axe and, contrary to the sentence, beheaded Pugachev without 'quartering'. This outraged both the judges and the crowd. Someone, possibly one of the sentencing judges, called out to the executioner and 'threatened him in severe terms'. Another official shouted, 'Ah, you son of a bitch - what have you done?' And then added: 'Well hurry up - hands and feet!' Witnesses said it was generally believed that the executioner 'will lose his tongue ... for his neglect'. The executioner paid no attention and dismembered the corpse, before moving on to cut off the tongues and clip the noses of the other miscreants who had avoided the death penalty. Pugachev's diverse quarters were exposed at the top of a pole in the middle of the scaffold. The head was stuck on an iron spike and displayed.⁵⁷ The Pugachevschina - the Time of Pugachev - was over.

Some time in the last stages of the crisis, Catherine wrote this letter to Potemkin: 'My dear soul, cher Epoux, darling husband, come and snuggle up, if you please. Your caress is sweet and lovely to me ... Beloved husband.'⁵⁸

9

MARRIAGE: MADAME POTEMKIN

My marble beauty ... my beloved, better than any king ... no man on earth can equal you...

Catherine II to G. A. Potemkin

Catherine and Potemkin planned a secret rendezvous that must have filled them with a sense of mounting anticipation, jubilation and anxiety. On 4 June 1774, the Empress, still recovering in Tsarskoe Selo from her blistering confrontation with Prince Orlov, wrote this cryptic note to Potemkin, who was in the city: 'My dear, I'll come tomorrow and I'll bring with me that which you wrote about. Order them to prepare Field-Marshal Golitsyn's boat opposite the Sievers' landing-stage, if it will be possible to pull in to the shore not far from the palace .. .V Alexander Golitsyn, Potemkin's first commander in the war, was Governor-General of the capital, so he had his own boat. Count Yakov Sievers had a landing stage on the Fontanka, beside the Summer Palace.

On 5 June, as promised to Potemkin, the Empress returned to St Petersburg. Next day, a Friday, she held a small dinner for her senior courtiers in the little garden of the Summer Palace, perhaps to say goodbye to Prince Orlov, about to 'travel abroad'. On Sunday, 8 June, Catherine and Potemkin attended a dinner in honour of the Izmailovsky Guards: the toasts were answered by salvoes of cannon; the meal on a silver service from Paris was accompanied by Italian singers. Afterwards, Catherine walked on the banks of the Fontanka beside Count Sievers's house.²

At midnight on that summer's evening, the Empress set off on a mysterious boating trip from the Summer Palace on the Fontanka. She often visited her courtiers in their houses on the Neva or on the islands that made up St Petersburg. But this was different. It was late for a woman who liked to be in bed by 11 p.m. She left secretly, her face probably hidden by a hooded cloak.³ It is said that she was alone - except for her loyal maid, Maria Savishna Perekushina. General-en-Chef Potemkin, who had been with her all day, was absent. He had slipped away at dusk to a boat waiting on the river, which had borne him into the mist and then out of sight.

Catherine's boat struck out of the Fontanka, past the Summer Palace with its gardens, into the Great Neva river, heading for the unfashionable Viborg Side. The boat moored at the one of the little jetties on the Little Nevka. There the Empress climbed into an unmarked carriage, waiting with the curtains drawn. As soon as Empress and maid were inside, the postillions whipped the horses and the carriage headed briskly down the road. It stopped on the right outside the Church of St Sampsonovsky. There was no one around. The ladies disembarked and entered St Sampsonov. The church had been built by Peter the Great, unusually in the Ukrainian style, in wood (it was rebuilt in stone in 1781), to celebrate the saint's day of the Battle of Poltava. Its most striking feature was a high bell tower, painted in lilac blue, white and green.⁴

The Empress found Potemkin inside the church, illuminated by candles. The greatest nailbiter in the Empire' would have chewed his fingers to the quick. Since they had attended the Izmailovsky Guards dinner earlier, both would still be in their 'regimentals' - Potemkin in his uniform of a general- en-chef - green coat with red collar, braided with gold lace, red breeches, high boots, sword, hat with gold border and white feathers. We know from the Court Journal that Catherine was wearing her 'long Regimental Guards uniform' all day: it was 'trimmed in gold lace made in the form of a lady's riding habit'.⁵ The Empress could now hand the hooded cloak to her maid, knowing that she looked most fetching in 'regimentals'. Perhaps her dress reminded them of the day they met.

There were just three other men in the church. A nameless priest and the two 'grooms'. Catherine's 'groom' was Chamberlain Evgraf Alexandrovich Chertkov; Potemkin's was his nephew, Alexander Nikolaievich Samoilov. It was the nephew who read the portion from the Gospel. When he reached the words 'wife be afraid of her husband', Samoilov hesitated and glanced at the Sovereign. Could an empress be afraid of her husband? Catherine nodded and he continued.⁶ The priest then commenced the marriage ceremony. Samo­ilov and Chertkov stepped forward to hold the crowns over their heads as in a traditional Orthodox wedding. When the long ceremony was finished, the wedding certificates were signed and distributed among the witnesses. All were sworn to secrecy. Potemkin had become the secret consort of Catherine II.

This is the legend of Potemkin and Catherine's wedding. There is no conclusive proof that they married, but it is almost certain they did. However, secret marriages have always been the stuff of royal myth. In Russia, Empress Elisabeth was said to have married Alexei Razumovsky. In England, the Prince of Wales was soon to marry Mrs Fitzherbert in a secret ceremony, the validity of which was much debated.

There are many versions of the marriage: some say they married in Moscow the next year or in Petersburg in 1784 or 1791.⁷ The Moscow version takes place in the Church of the Ascension of our Lord near Nikitsky, with its distinctive round dome, painted yellow. This was close to the house of Potemkin's mother, where he lived in Moscow. The church was later embel­lished with Potemkin's money,⁸ in his mother's memory. It is most famous now as the church where Alexander Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova on 18 February 1831 - one of many links between them.[23]

A secret marriage could well have taken place on many another day during their relationship and the details of it concealed in the routine account of their activities. However, this time and place are the most likely. The letter from Catherine mentioned a secret enterprise and the Sievers's jetty. The Court Journal of 8 June showed her embarking and disembarking there. There is time in the early or late evening for the secret boat trip. All the oral legends, handed down by the wedding guests and their descendants and recorded by Professor Bartenev in the nineteenth century, mentioned the St Samsonov Church, mid- to late 1774, and the same four witnesses. But where are the certificates? Potemkin's was supposed inherited by his dearest niece, Alexandra Branicka. She told the secret to her son-in-law Prince Michael Vorontsov, and left the certificate to her daughter, Princess Lise. Count Orlov- Davydov remembered a visit to Count Samoilov, who showed him a jewelled buckle. 'This', he said, was presented to me by the Empress in memory of her marriage with my late uncle.' Samoilov's certificate was buried with him, according this his grandson Count A. A. Bobrinsky. Chertkov's copy passed into obscurity.

The disappearance of the evidence and the secrecy are not as dubious as they might seem, because no one would have dared expose this during the strict, militaristic reigns of Tsars Paul, Alexander I and Nicholas I - or afterwards. The 'Victorian' Romanovs were embarrassed by Catherine's love life, which, through the doubts about Paul's paternity, questioned their legitimacy. As late as the 1870s, Professor Bartenev had to ask the Emperor's permission even to do the research and it could not be published until 1906: only in the interim between the 1905 and 1917 Revolu­tions, when the Autocracy was on its last legs, did Nicholas II permit its publication.⁹

The strongest evidence of their marriage lies in Catherine's letters; the way she treated Potemkin; how he behaved; and how their relationship was described by insiders. She signed her letters 'devoted wife' and called him her 'dear husband' in at least twenty-two letters, naming him her 'lord' or 'master' in hundreds of others.¹⁰ 'I'll die if you'll change ... my dear friend, loving husband'¹¹ is an early mention of the word in their love letters. 'Father, Ch[er] Ep[oux] - [darling husband] - ... I've sent Kelhen to cure your chest, I love you very much, my beloved friend,' she wrote.¹² She called Potemkin's nephew - 'our nephew'¹³ (author's italics). Monarchs, more than normal mortals, have a very precise definition of who is or is not a member of their family. She was to treat some of his family as if they were her own until her death - so much so that there were rumours that his niece Branicka was her own child.¹⁴ Her most revealing and specific letter on the subject probably dates from a year later, possibly in early 1776:

My Lord and Cher Epoux ... Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy imagin­ation rather than the real facts, all of which confirm the words of your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago by holy ties? I love you and I am bound to you by all possible ties. Just compare, were my acts more meaningful two years ago than they are now?^ls (author's italics)

The marriage, as both no doubt hoped, seemed to bring them even closer together. Probably Potemkin, in love with Catherine, tormented by jealousies and the fragility of his position, and ambitious to play an independent role, was soothed by it. He may have been as dissolute as he was pious, but he was a practising Orthodox believer, which may have helped persuade her. For her part, it might seem that marriage would be odd after a relationship of just a few months, but one should also quote that mother's saying - 'you just know when it is the right person'. Moreover Catherine had known Potemkin for twelve years and had loved him for some time: she knew him very well already. Their love was not only overwhelming but they were, as she put it, 'twin souls'. At last she had found an intellectual equal with whom she could share the burden of ruling and the warmth of family.

The best piece of evidence is that, whether or not one accepts there was a ceremony, Catherine treated Potemkin for the rest of their lives as if there had been. Whatever he did, he never fell from power; he was treated like a member of the imperial family and had absolute access to the Treasury as well as the ability to make independent decisions. He behaved with extraordinary confidence, indeed insouciance, and deliberately presented himself in the tsarist tradition.

The foreign ambassadors suspected something: one diplomat learned from a 'person of credit' that Potemkin's 'nieces were in possession of the cer­tificate,'¹⁶ but such was the awe for monarchs in those days that they never mentioned 'marriage' specifically in writing, saving it up to tell their Courts directly. Thus the French Ambassador, Comte de Segur, informed Versailles in December 1788 that Potemkin 'takes advantage of ... certain sacred and inviolable rights ... The singular basis of these rights is a great mystery which is known to only four people in Russia; a lucky chance enabled me to discover it and when I have thoroughly sounded it, I shall, on the first occasion ... inform the King'¹⁷ (author's italics). The Most Christian King already knew: by October, Louis XVI was calling Catherine 'Madame Potemkin' to Comte de Vergennes, his Foreign Minister - though he meant it partly as a joke.¹⁸

The Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, soon found out too. He explained the riddle of Catherine and Potemkin, while strolling in the Viennese Augarten, to the British envoy Lord Keith like this: 'for a thousand reasons and as many connections of every sort, she could not easily get rid of him, even if she harboured the wish of doing so. One must have been in Russia to comprehend all the particulars of the Empress's situation'¹⁹ (author's italics). This was presumably what was also meant by Charles Whitworth, the British Ambas­sador to Petersburg, when he reported in 1791 that Potemkin was unsackable and unaccountable.²⁰

Potemkin hinted that he was almost royal. During the Second Russo- Turkish War, the Prince de Ligne suggested to Potemkin that he could become Prince of Moldavia and Wallachia. 'That's a joke to me,' replied Potemkin. 'I could be King of Poland, if I wanted; I refused to be Duke of Courland; I am far more than all that'^2I (author's italics). What could be 'far more than' being a king if not being the consort of the Empress of Russia?

Now the couple got back to work. After the wedding, they, as usual, revelled in the suspicions of others: did anyone notice how crazily in love they were? She wondered what 'our nephew' - possibly Samoilov - thought about their behaviour. 'I think our madness seemed very strange to him.'²²

On another occasion, someone had guessed a great secret. 'What can we do darling? These things often happen,' Catherine mused. 'Peter the Great in cases like that used to send people out to the market to bring back information he alone thought was secret; sometimes, by combination, people just guess.. Л²³

On 16 January 1775, as soon as she knew Pugachev was dead, the Empress, accompanied by Potemkin, set out from Tsarskoe Selo for Moscow, where they were to hold celebrations for the victory over Turkey. Catherine had been planning to go to Moscow ever since the peace was signed but her dear 'Marquis de Pugachev' had delayed matters. Potemkin, according to Gunning, had encouraged her to visit the old capital, presumably to celebrate the opening of a window on to the Black Sea and to project the fact that government was in charge after Pugachev.

On the 25th, she staged a ceremonial entry with Grand Duke Paul. In case she forgot that she was now in the heartland of old Russia, Paul was warmly welcomed wherever he went while, according to Gunning, Catherine 'passed with scarcely any acclamations amongst the populace or their manifesting the least degree of satisfaction.'²⁴ But the Pugachev Rebellion had shown her that the interior needed some attention: she was to spend most of the year there. She stayed in the Golovin and suburban Kolomenskoe Palaces, where Potemkin was also given apartments designed by her, but she found them uncomfortable and unfriendly, a metaphor for all she disliked about Moscow.

Empresses do not honeymoon, but she and Potemkin obviously wanted to spend some private time together. In June she bought Prince Kantemir's estate, Black Earth, where she decided to built a new palace: she renamed it Tsaritsyno. Those who believe she married Potemkin, whether in Moscow or Petersburg, claim that this was where they had their version of a honeymoon. They wanted to live cosily, so they stayed there for months on end in a cottage with just six rooms, like a couple of bourgeois/⁵

Honeymoon or not, they were always planning, imagining, drafting: we can follow how hard they worked together in their letters. Catherine did not always agree with her pupil nor he with her. 'Don't be angry if you find that all my proposals are mad,' she told him while discussing the problem of licensing salt production and agreeing to his proposal that Pavel Potemkin and his brother Mikhail should investigate it. T couldn't invent anything better.' Potemkin was always off the mark with finance - whether his own or the state's. He was an entrepreneur, not a manager. When he proposed taking on the salt monopoly, she warned him: 'Don't burden yourself with it because it will provoke hatred ...'. He was hurt. She soothed him - but firmly: 'I don't want to make you look like a fool or have the reputation of one ... You know very well you wrote nonsense. I ask you to write a good law ... and you scold me.' If he was lazy, for example in editing the Pugachev amnesty, she hectored him: 'Monday to Friday is enough time to read it.'²⁶

Catherine's solutions to the Pugachevschina were administrative and involved the restructuring of local government and increasing the par­ticipation of nobles, townspeople and state peasants in judiciary and welfare. She boasted to Grimm of suffering from 'a new sickness called legislomania'.²⁷ Potemkin corrected her drafts, as he did later with her Police Code and her Charters to the Nobility and Towns: 'We ask you to put + near the articles and it will mean you agree. If you put # near articles, they are to be excluded ... write your changes clearly.' His changes impressed her: 'I see in them fervent zeal and your great intellect.'²⁸

The couple now arranged a piratical game of international kidnapping. In February 1775, the Empress commissioned Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky to seduce a peculiar young woman in Leghorn, Italy, where Scarface commanded the Russian Fleet, and bring her back to Russia.

She was twenty, slender, dark-haired, with an Italianate profile, an alabaster complexion and grey eyes. She sang, painted and played the harp. She affected the chastity of a vestal virgin while simultaneously taking lovers like a courtesan. The girl used many names, but only one mattered. She claimed to be 'Princess Elisabeth', the daughter of the Empress Elisabeth and Alexei

Razumovsky. She was the very quintessence of the eighteenth-century adven­turess: every epoch is a balance of opposites so that this golden age of aristocrats was also the ripest season for impostors; the age of pedigree was also that of pretence. Now that travel was easier while communications were still slow, Europe was plagued, and embellished, by young men and women of dubious ancestry taking advantage of the long distances to claim aristocracy or royalty. Russia, as we have seen, had its own history of pretenderism and the lady with whom Orlov-Chesmensky was now to rendezvous was one of the most romantic of its impostors.

She first emerged using the name 'Ali Emena' - claiming to be the daughter of a Persian satrap. On ligging jaunts from Persia to Germany, she appeared and disappeared with a vanity case filled with Ruritanian titles: Princess Vladimir, Sultana Selime, demoiselles Frank and Schell; Countess Treymill in Venice; Countess Pinneberg in Pisa and then Countess Silvisky. Later she was Princess of Azov, a Petrine name for this was the port on the Sea of Azov conquered and lost by Peter the Great. As ever with hucksters who manage to convince many of their inherent truth, she was obviously charismatic and it helped that the 'Princess' possessed soulful delicacy. She was everything that a mysterious princess should be. On her travels, credulous older aristocrats fell under her spell, protected her, financed her...

Towards the end of the Russo-Turkish War, she headed for the land of disguise - Italy, the realm of Cagliostro and Casanova, where adventurers were as common as cardinals. No one ever discovered who she really was, but it was not long before every diplomat in Italy was investigating her origins: was she the daughter of a Czech coffee-house owner, a Polish innkeeper, a Nuremberg baker?

She hooked Prince Karol Radziwill, who was an anti-Russian Confederate Pole. Accompanied by an entourage of Polish nobles in their national costume, she became a political weapon against Russia. However, she made the mistake of writing to the British Ambassador to Naples. Aesthete and later cuckolded husband of Nelson's mistress Emma, Sir William Hamilton was particularly susceptible to lissom adventuresses and he gave her a passport, but he then wrote to Orlov-Chesmensky, who immediately informed Petersburg.¹⁹

The Catherine who replied was the ruthless usurper usually hidden from view. After Pugachev she was in no mood to take risks with pretenders, however feminine and young: the swaggering almost gangsterish tone of the letter gives us a glimpse of how she might have behaved behind closed doors with the Orlovs. If those Ragusans do not hand over the miscreant, 'one can toss a few bombs into the town', she told Orlov-Chesmensky when the woman visited Ragusa. But it would be much better to capture her 'without noise if possible'.³⁰

Scarface devised a devious plan to play on this adventuress's delusions of grandeur and on her romantic dreams. He had two advisers as subtle as he was brutal: Jose Ribas, said to be a Spanish-Neapolitan cook's son, joined the Russian Fleet in Italy. This talented mountebank, who later became a successful Russian general and one of Potemkin's closest cronies, worked with a deft adjutant named Ivan Krestinek, who ingratiated himself into the ersatz Princess's suite and enticed her to meet Orlov-Chesmensky in Pisa.

Scarface courted her, wrote her love letters, let her use his carriage and took her to the theatre. None of the Russians was allowed to sit down in her presence, as if she really was a member of the imperial family. But he also claimed to be furious that Potemkin had replaced his brother Prince Orlov and offered to use his fleet to help her mount the throne in order to return his family to their rightful place beside a new empress. His deception may have been a most pleasurable game: it seems she did become his mistress and that the affair lasted eight days. Maybe the girl believed that he was in love with her and she was successfully gulling him. In such heartless matters of state, Scarface was a master. His marriage proposal baited the trap.

He invited her to inspect his fleet at Livorno. She accepted. The squadron was commanded by a plainspoken Scottish vice-admiral, Samuel Greig, one of the architects of Chesme. Greig agreed to welcome the Princess, two Polish noblemen, two valets and four servants, all Italians, aboard with imperial honours. There she found a priest awaiting them, surrounded by the crew in ceremonial uniforms. Imperial salvoes were fired; sailors hailed her, 'Long Live the Empress!' The priest chanted a blessing over 'Princess Elisabeth' and Orlov-Chesmensky. It is said she wept with joy as all her dreams came true.

When she looked around, the Count was no longer beside her. His myr­midons seized 'the villain', as Orlov-Chesmensky reported to his Empress in Moscow, and took her below. As the ship headed for Petersburg, we know that Potemkin was in correspondence with Orlov-Chesmensky - some of the letters have survived and they would certainly have discussed this affair. Catherine shared Scarface's letters with him. 'My honey, my sweetheart,' she wrote at the time of the kidnapping, 'send me the letter[s] from ... Co[unt] Al[exei] Gr[igorevich] Orlov.' In April, the couple discussed the reward due to Krestinek for his effective if distasteful work in reeling in the adventuress. Many felt that Greig's role in this dubious kidnapping on foreign soil was unbecoming in a British officer, but no evidence has reached us that the admiral, who was set on making a career in Russian service, had any com­punction about kidnapping a young woman, especially as he was personally thanked in Moscow by Catherine herself.

The 'Princess' arrived in Petersburg on 12 May and was immediately delivered under cover of darkness to the Peter and Paul Fortress, though legend says she was kept for a while in one of Potemkin's suburban residences. Field-Marshal Golitsyn, Governor of Petersburg, interrogated her to learn who backed her and if she really believed her story. It seems that, like many of those who are able to convince followers of deceptions, she believed her own stories: Golitsyn reported to Catherine that 'the story of her life is filled with fantastic affairs and rather resembles fairy-tales'. Catherine and

Potemkin would have followed this interrogation with interest. In the fevered imaginations of Russian peasants, crazier stories had created armies. But when the 'Princess' wrote to Catherine asking for an interview, and signed herself 'Elisabeth', the Empress turned on her: 'Send someone to tell the notorious woman that if she wishes to lighten her petty fate, then she should cease playing comedy.'³¹

While Catherine and Potemkin celebrated victory in Moscow, 'Princess Elisabeth', who already suffered from tuberculosis, was kept in a damp cell where she dwelt in her castles in the air. She pathetically appealed for better conditions in her letters to Catherine. But she did not exist any more. No one heard her. Just as Catherine had turned a blind eye to Peter's murder and had arranged for Ivan's jailers to kill him if necessary, now the consumptive girl was abandoned. There were two floods in St Petersburg in June and July of that summer and a greater one in 1777, so the legend grew that the shivering beauty had been gradually drowned as the waters rose in her subterranean cell. This was the image recreated in Flavitsky's chilling portrait. It was also claimed that she died giving birth to Orlov-Chesmensky's child and that he was tormented with guilt - an unlikely sentiment in his case.

She is known to history by one of the few imaginable titles she had not used herself: 'Princess Tarakanova', literally 'of the cockroaches'. The name derived from her claims to be the child of Alexei Razumovsky, whose nephews were called Daraganov - which may have become 'Tarakanov'. But 'Princess of the Cockroaches' could also have come from the image of the insects who were the sole companions of her last days.³² While the Empress was preparing to return to the capital, 'Princess Elisabeth' perished of consumption on 4 December 1775. She ^was twenty-three. Her body was hastily and secretly buried - another inconvenience snuffed out.³³

When the Grand Duke Paul and the Court returned from the Kolomenskoe Palace outside town on 6 July 1775, ^even dour Moscow must have been incandescent with excitement, teeming with soldiers, princes, ambassadors, priests and ordinary folk, all ready for ten days of partying. The celebrations, the first political spectacular arranged by Potemkin, were designed to reflect Russia's victorious emergence from six years of war, pestilence and rebellion. Eighteenth-century festivities usually involved triumphal arches and fire­works. The arches, based on the Roman model, were sometimes made of stone but more usually of canvas, wood-bunting or papier-mache. Notes flew between Empress and Potemkin over every detail: 'Have you received the people working on the feu d'artifice for the peace?', she asked him.³⁴

The intricacy and scale of the arrangements put everyone on edge. When Simon Vorontsov arrived with his troops, 'I presented to ... Potemkin the state in which my regiment was and he gave me his word he would not make us do exercises or public inspections for three months ... But ten days later, against his word, he sent me to say that the Empress with all her Court would come to see the exercises ... I understand that he wanted me to lose face in public .. Л The next day, they argued violently.³⁵

On 8 July, the hero of the war, Field-Marshal Rumiantsev, approached the city. Potemkin sent a fond, respectful note to 'batushka' Rumiantsev arranging to meet him at Chertanova, 'where the marquee [of the triumphal arch] is ready', signing off, 'Your most humble and faithful servant, G. Potemkin.' Potemkin then rode out and brought the Field-Marshal to Catherine's apart­ments.

On the 10th, the imperial entourage walked from the Prechinsky Gate to the Kremlin. Potemkin had stage-managed a splendid show to convince foreign observers of the ascendancy of this victorious Empress. 'Every street in the Kremlin was filled with soldiers ... a great dais ... draped in red cloths, and all the walls of the cathedrals and other buildings, were lined with rows of tiered seats to create a vast amphitheatre ... But nothing can compare with the magnificent sight which greeted us with the procession of the Empress ...'. As the earth literally shook with the 'sound and thunder' of ringing bells, the Empress, wearing a small crown and purple cloak lined with ermine, progressed back to the Cathedral with Rumiantsev on her left and Potemkin on her right. Over her head, twelve generals bore a purple canopy. Her train was carried by Chevaliers-Gardes, in red and gold uniforms with glittering silver helmets and ostrich plumes. Her entire Court followed 'in gorgeous dress'. At the door of the Uspensky, the Empress was greeted by her bishops. Solemn mass was performed, the 'Те Deum' sung. 'We were entranced,' recalled a spectator.³⁶

After the service, the Empress held a ceremony of decoration in the Faceted Hall. Catherine surrounded by her four field-marshals, distributed the prizes of victory. She granted Rumiantsev the title suffix of 'Zadunaisky' - literally 'Beyond the Danube'. This dashing surname was Potemkin's idea - Catherine asked him earlier: 'My friend, is it still necessary to give the Marshal the title "Zadunaisky"?'³⁷ Once again, Potemkin was supporting Rumiantsev, not trying to ruin him. Zadunaisky also received 5,000 souls, 100,000 roubles, a service of plate and a hat with a wreath of precious stones worth 30,000 roubles. Prince Vasily Dolgoruky received the title 'Krimsky' for taking the Crimea in 1771. But the most significant prizes went to Potemkin: the diploma of his first title, count of the Russian Empire, along with a ceremonial sword. The Empress emphasized his political work, specifically citing his contribution to the Turkish treaty. As she told Grimm, 'Ah - what a good mind that man has! He's played more part than anyone in this peace.'³⁸ After one of their rows, she had promised, 'I'll give you the portrait on the day of the peace - adieu my jewel, my heart, dear husband.'³⁹ So now Potemkin received the Empress's miniature portrait, decorated with diamonds, to wear on his breast. Only Prince Orlov had had this privilege before, and Count Potemkin wore it in all his portraits and for the rest of his life - whenever, that is, he deigned to dress properly.

The festivities were to last two weeks: Potemkin had planned a rollicking and bucolic fairground on the Khodynskoe fields, where he had erected two pavilions to symbolize 'The Black Sea with all our conquests'. He created an imperial theme park with roads representing the Don and Dnieper, theatres and dining-rooms named after Black Sea ports, Turkish minarets, Gothic arches, Classical columns. Catherine enthusiastically praised Potemkin's first chance to display his unrivalled imagination as an impresario of political show business. Long lines of carriages were driven by coachmen 'dressed as Turks, Albanians, Serbs, Circassians, Hussars and "genuine Negro servants" in crimson turbans'. Catherine wheels exploded into light and as many as 60,000 people drank wines from fountains and feasted on roast oxen.⁴⁰

On 12 July, the celebrations were delayed when Catherine fell ill. There is a legend that this was to disguise the birth of a child by Potemkin. She was a past mistress at concealing embarrassing pregnancies in the folds of clothes already designed for her plumpness. The cabinets of Europe were certainly gossiping that she was pregnant. 'Madame Potemkin is a good 45 years old - a fine age for having children,' Louis XVI had earlier joked to Vergennes.⁴¹ The child was said to have been Elisaveta Grigorevna Temkina, who was brought up in the Samoilov household, so she had some connection to the family. Illegitimate children in Russia traditionally adopted their father's name without the first syllable; thus Ivan Betskoi was the bastard of Prince Ivan Trubetskoi, Rontsov the son of Roman Vorontsov.

However, this story is unlikely. Potemkin was very family-minded and made a fuss of all his relations, yet there is no record of him paying any attention to Temkina. Catherine also would have cherished her. But there was a separate ancient Temkin family that had nothing to do with the Potemkins. Fur­thermore, in that time, it was not regarded as reprehensible to have a 'fille naturelle' or 'pupille'. Bobrinsky, Catherine's son with Prince Orlov, was not hidden, and Betskoi enjoyed a successful public career. If she was Potemkin's daughter by a low-born mistress, there was even less reason to conceal her. Temkina remains an enigma - but not one necessarily connected to Catherine and Potemkin.⁴² In Moscow, meanwhile, the Empress was confined to her apartments in the Prechistensky Palace for a week and then recovered. The festivities continued.

In Moscow, Count Potemkin was approached by the British with a strange request. In 1775, Britain's American colonies had rebelled against London. This was to distract the Western world from Russian affairs for eight years, a window of opportunity which Potemkin was to use well. France and its Bourbon ally, Spain, at once saw the possibility of avenging British victory in the Seven Years War twelve years earlier. London had turned down Panin's suggestion of an Anglo-Russian alliance because Britain refused to undertake the defence of Russia against the Ottoman Empire. But now George III and his Secretary of State for the North, the Earl of Suffolk, were suddenly faced with the American Revolution. Since Britain had the best fleet in the world but a negligible army, it traditionally hired mercenaries. In this case, it decided to procure Russian troops.

By 1 September 1775, Suffolk was complaining that 'the increasing frenzy of His Majesty's unhappy and deluded people on the other side of the Atlantic' meant that Russian assistance was needed immediately. Specifically, Britain wanted '20,000 disciplined infantry completely equipped and ready to embark as soon as the Baltic navigation opens in the spring'. When Panin showed no interest, Gunning approached Potemkin, who was intrigued. Ultimately Catherine refused, writing George III a polite letter and wishing him luck.⁴³

Poor Gunning had to write home a few weeks later: 'I can scarcely entertain any hopes at present... could not His Majesty make use of Hanoverians?'⁴⁴ Finally, the desperate British hired the army of that mercenary state of Hesse. The Americans with their united ideals and irregular tactics defeated the rigidly drilled, demoralized British, but one wonders if the hardy, brutal and homogeneous Russians, backed by Cossacks, could have beaten them. The tantalizing possibilities of this stretch out all the way to the Cold War and beyond.

Catherine and Potemkin's relationship was so all-consuming that it was beginning to burn them both. 'We would be happier', said Catherine, 'if we loved each other less.'⁴⁵ The sexual cauldron of the first eighteen months could not be sustained, but there was evidence too that the tensions of his role as official favourite were taking a toll on their affair. The teacher- pupil relationship that Catherine so enjoyed was becoming irksome if not intolerable to a man as masterful, confident and able as Potemkin. Even the marriage could not change the realities of court politics and his complete dependence on her whim. Yet she loved his wildness - the very thing that made him want to escape. Was he withdrawing from her or did he just need space to breathe?

She tried desperately to restore their happiness. 'It's time to live in harmony. Don't torment me,' she wrote. When he was outraged at his subordinate position, the Empress promised: 'I will never order you to do anything, you fool, because I don't deserve such coldness ... I swore to give only caress for caress. I want cuddles and loving cuddles, the best sort. Stupid coldness and stupid spleen will only produce anger and vexation in return. It's difficult for you to say "my dear" or "my honey". Is it possible that your heart is silent? My heart does not keep silent.'⁴⁶ Catherine was cut to the quick by his increasing harshness: was her consort falling out of love with her?

She did all she could to please him: during autumn 1775, when she was about to embark on a trip out of Moscow, reported Gunning, 'it had been forgotten that the succeeding Wednesday was Count Potemkin's nameday, the recollection of which determined her to postpone her intended excursion... to admit of the Count's receiving the compliments of the nobility'. Gunning added that the Empress had also given him a present of 100,000 roubles - and appointed a Greek archbishop for Potemkin's southern provinces on his recommendation. This was Potemkin at his most demanding: typical of him to change an empress's timetable, receive a prince's ransom of a present - and not forget to achieve a political appointment.⁴⁷

Sometimes, Catherine complained that he humiliated her in front of the Court: 'My dear Lord, Grigory Alexandrovich, I wish Your Excellency hap­piness. This evening, you had better lose at cards because you absolutely forgot me and left me alone as if I was a gatepost.' But Potemkin knew how to play her, replying with a line of Arabesque symbols - possibly a sexual code in their secret language, adding: 'That's the answer .. .'.⁴® But what was the answer? How could she keep her consort and yet make him happy?

Catherine

The couple developed their own way of communicating their feelings - his obscure and passionate, hers understanding and accommodating - the epistolary duet:

Potemkin

My precious soul You know that I am Absolutely yours And I have only you I will remain faithful To you until death And I need your Support

For this reason, and Because of my wish, Serving you and applying My abilities is most Pleasant to me.

I know

I know, I know It is true.

I don't doubt you.

I believe it.

That was proved long Ago.

Doing some- Thing for me

With gladness, but What?

You'll never regret It and you'll see Only benefits.

My soul is glad but unclear. Tell me more clearly.⁴⁹

Potemkin was somehow withdrawing from her. It is said that he claimed to be ill to avoid her embraces. As he became restless, Catherine tired of his endless tempers. The towering, eye-flashing rages that are so attractive at the beginning of a love affair became irksome exhibitionism in the middle of a marriage. Potemkin's behaviour was impossible, but Catherine was partly to blame. She was slow to understand the constant tension of Potemkin's political and social position which was to break so many of her later lovers. Catherine- was just as emotionally greedy as he was. They were both human furnaces requiring an endless supply of fuel in the form of glory, extravagance and power on one hand, love, praise and attention on the other. It is these gargantuan appetites that made their relationship as painful as it was pro­ductive. Potemkin wanted to govern and build, but loving Catherine was a full-time job. It was a human impossibility for each of them to give each other enough of what they required. They were too similar to be together.

In May 1775, before the peace celebrations had started, Catherine did her Orthodox duty by leading a pilgrimage to the forbidding Troitsko-Sergeevna Monastery, an obligatory trip back into the Muscovite dark ages when women were kept in the seclusion of the terem and not on thrones. The visit brought out Potemkin's Slavic disgust for worldly success, his Orthodox yearnings and probably his discontent with his place. Succumbing to his coenobitic instincts and ignoring Catherine, he temporarily abandoned the Court and prayed in seclusion in a monk's cell.⁵⁰

The rapidity of his mood changes must have been exhausting for both of them. Perhaps this was what she meant when she said that they loved each other too much to be happy: the relationship was so combustible that it was not settled enough to serve either of them well. They continued to love each other and work together throughout 1775, but the stress was rising. Catherine understood what was happening. She had found a partner in Potemkin - a rare diamond - but how was he to find a role? And how were they to satisfy their demanding natures and yet remain together? While they struggled, they looked around them.

The day before the peace celebrations, Count Potemkin received a sad note from his brother-in-law Vasily Engelhardt telling him of the death of his sister Elena Marfa. They had six daughters (the eldest was already married) and a son in the army. The five younger daughters were aged between twenty-one and eight. 'I ask you to take care of them and to take the place of Marfa Alexandrovna ...', Engelhardt wrote to Potemkin on 5 July. 'By your order, I'll send them to your mother.' There was no reason why their father could not bring them up in Smolensk, but Engelhardt, a man of the world, realized his daughters would benefit from life at Court. Potemkin summoned them to Moscow.

The Empress, like any dutiful wife, was meeting the Potemkin family. When her formidable mother-in-law, Daria Potemkina, who still lived in Moscow,[24] was presented, Catherine was at her thoughtful and sensitive best: 'I noticed your mother was most elegant but that she has no watch. Here is one which I ask you to give her.'⁵¹ When the nieces arrived, Catherine welcomed them warmly and told Potemkin, To make your mother happy you can nominate as many of your nieces as you want as Maids-of-Honour.'⁵² On 10 July, the climax of the peace celebrations, the eldest of this brood, Alexandra Engel- hardt, twenty-one, was appointed a frele or maid-of-honour to the Empress.⁵³ The second and most decorous, Varvara, was soon to join her. As soon as they arrived, the nieces were hailed as Russia's superlative beauties.

Meanwhile, Catherine was busy drafting her legislation, aided by two young secretaries she had recently borrowed from Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky's staff: Peter Zavadovsky and Alexander Bezborodko. The latter, cleverest of the two, was so ugly and ungainly as to be somewhat fascinating. But Zavadovsky was methodical, cultured and good-looking. His pursued lips and humourless eyes suggested he was a sanctimonious plodder - the precise opposite of Potemkin, perhaps even antidote to him. During the many hours of drafting and during the tiresome journey back to St Petersburg, as they left grim Moscow at last, Catherine, Potemkin and Zavadovsky became an odd three­some.

We can imagine the scene in Catherine's apartments: Potemkin, stretched out on a divan in a flowing dressing gown, a bandana round his head, no wig and tousled hair everywhere, chewing radishes and imitating courtiers, bubbles with ideas, jokes and tantrums, while Zavadovsky perches stiffly and patiently in his wig and uniform, writing at his desk, his eyes fixed with labrador devotion on the Empress...

IO

HEARTBREAK AND UNDERSTANDING

My soul, I'm doing everything for you so at least encourage me a little with affectionate and calm behaviour ... my little dear lord, lovable husband.

Catherine II to Count Potemkin

But in such matters Russia's mighty Empress Behaved no better than a common sempstress

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 77

'My husband just said to me "Where should I go, what should I do?"', Catherine wrote to Count Potemkin around this time. 'My darling and well- loved husband, come to my place and you will be received with open arms!'¹ On 2 January 1776, Catherine appointed Peter Zavadovsky as adjutant- general. This menage-a-trois puzzled the Court.

The diplomats realized that something was happening in the Empress's private life and presumed that Potemkin's career was over: 'The Empress begins to see the liberties of her favourite [Potemkin] in a different light ... It is already whispered that a person placed about her by Mr Rumiantsev bids fair to gain her entire confidence.'² There were rumours that Potemkin would lose the College of War, either to Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky or to Panin's nephew Prince Repnin. But an English diplomat, Richard Oakes, noticed that Potemkin was expanding his interests, not reducing them, and 'seems to interest himself more in foreign affairs than he at first affected to do.'³ While the Anglo-Saxons could not quite grasp what might be happening, the waspish French envoy, Chevalier Marie Daniel Bourree de Corberon, who kept an invaluable diary of his life at Court, suspected that it would take more than Zavadovsky to destroy him. 'Better in face than Potemkin,' he observed. 'But his favour not yet decided.' Then in the sarcastic tone that diplomats habitually adopted when discussing the imperial sex life: 'His talents have been put to the test in Moscow. But Potemkin ... still has the air of credit... so Zavadovsky is probably only an amusement.'⁴

Between January and March 1776, the Empress avoided large gatherings as she struggled to work out her relationship with Count Potemkin. That January, Prince Orlov reappeared after his travels and this muddied the waters even further because there were now three present or former favourites at Court. Grigory Orlov was back in his hearty old form, but he was no longer the man he had been: overweight and struck by attacks of 'palsy', he was in love with his cousin Ekaterina Zinovieva, aged fifteen, one of the Empress's maids-of-honour, whom some accounts claim he had raped. The ruthless competition at Court is reflected in the rumours that Potemkin was poisoning Orlov - something completely against his nature. Orlov's paralysis sounds like the later stages of syphilis, the sickly fruit of his well-known lack of discernment.

Catherine appeared only at small dinners. Peter Zavadovsky was frequently present; Potemkin was there less than before - but still too much for the former's liking. Zavadovsky must have felt inadequate between two of the most dynamic conversationalists of their time. Potemkin was still Catherine's lover, while the earnest Zavadovsky was increasingly in love with her. We do not know when (or if) she withdrew from Potemkin and took Zavadovsky as a lover - it was some time during that winter. Indeed, it was most likely that she never completely ceased to sleep with the man she called 'my husband'. Was she playing off one against the other, encouraging both? Naturally. Since by her own account she was one of those who could not contemplate a day without somebody to love her, it would have been only human for her to cast her eyes at her secretary when Potemkin was parading his lack of interest.

In some ways, their relationship is at its most moving in this tense six months because they still loved one another, regarding each other as husband and wife, drifting apart yet trying to find a way to stay together for ever. Count Potemkin sometimes wept in the arms of his Empress.

'Why do you want to cry?', she sweetly asked her 'Lord and Darling Husband' in the letter that reminded him of the 'sacred ties' of their marriage. 'How can I change my attitude towards you? Is it possible not to love you? Have confidence in my words ... I love you.'⁵

Potemkin had watched the closeness develop between Catherine and Zav­adovsky and at least tolerated it. He continued to be as difficult as usual, but he clearly did not mean to kill Zavadovsky as he had once threatened to do to his successor. The letters reveal a crisis in their relationship and a certain amount of jealousy towards Zavadovsky, but Potemkin appears to be so dominant that the other man does not really threaten him. It seems most likely that Potemkin approved of the new relationship - up to a point. It was simply a question of finding it.

Potemkin

'Your life is precious to me and I don't want to remove you,'⁶ the Empress told him specifically. They liked to settle rows with their dialogue letters: the second that has survived reads like the climax of a discussion, the calm reconciliation after a frantic storm of insecurities. This is much more specific than the earlier epistolary duet. The Empress is lovingly patient with her impossible eccentric, Potemkin is tender and gentle with her - incongruous qualities in such a man:

Catherine

Let me my love say this which will, I hope, end our argu­ment

Don't be surprised if I am

Disturbed by our love.

Not only have you showered

Me with good deeds,

You have placed me in your

heart. I want to be

There alone, and above everyone

else,

Because no one has ever loved

you so much; and

As I have been made by your

hands, I want my peace

To be the work of your hands,

that you should be

Happy in being good to me;

That you should find rest from the great

Labours arising from your high station

In thinking of my comfort. Amen

I allow it

The sooner the better

Don't be disturbed

So have you on me You are there firmly and

strongly and will

Remain there I see it and believe it

In my heart, I shall be

Happy to do so

It will be my greatest pleasure

Of course Give rest to our Thoughts and let Our feelings act freely They are most tender and

Will find the best way. End of quarrel. Amen.⁷

He was not always so kind. Potemkin, feeling vulnerable, lashed out at her

cruelly. 'I ask God to forgive you your vain despair and violence but also your injustice to me,' she replied. 'I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words.' Both suffered bitterly. 'I am not evil and not angry with you,' she tells him after one of their discussions. 'It depends on your will, how you treat me.' But she suggested that they could not sustain this tumultuous tension indefinitely: 'I want to see you calm and be in the same state too.'⁸

The Court searched for signs of Potemkin's fall or Zavadovsky's rise, while the couple debated what to do. Potemkin wanted to remain in power, so he had to keep his apartments in the Winter Palace. When he became upset, she told him what so many ordinary lovers have told their agonized partners - 'it's not difficult to decide: stay with me'. Then she typically added this reminder of their amorous-political partnership: 'All your political proposals are very reasonable.'⁹ But Catherine finally lost her cool too.

The way you sometimes talk, one might say I am a monster which has all the faults and especially that of stupidity ... this mind knows no other way of loving than making happy whoever it loves and for this reason it finds it impossible to bear even a moment's breach with him whom it loves without - to its despair - being loved in return ... My mind is busy trying to find virtues, some merits, in the object of its love. I like to see in you all the marvels...

After this expression of her hurt, as Potemkin fell out of love with her, she defined the heart of their problem: 'The essence of our disagreement is always the question of power and never that of love.'¹⁰

This has always been taken at face value, but it is a tidy feminine rewriting of their history. Their love was as stormy as their political collaboration. If power was the subject of their quarrels, then removing the love but keeping the power would also perpetuate their rows. Perhaps it was truer to say that the essence of their disagreement was the end of the intensely physical phase of their relationship and Potemkin's increasing maturity and need for freedom. Maybe Catherine could not bring herself to admit that he no longer wanted her as a woman - but they would always argue about power.

None of this satisfied him. Potemkin appears to have been in a permanent rage. 'You are angry,' she wrote in French. 'You keep away from me, you say you are offended ... What satisfaction can you want more? Even when the Church burns a heretic, it doesn't claim any more ... You're destroying all my happiness for the time that is left to me. Peace, my friend. I offer you my hand - will you take it, love?'¹¹

On her return to Petersburg from Moscow, Catherine wrote to Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, her envoy in Vienna, that she wished to 'get His Majesty [Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II] to raise General Count Grigory Potemkin, who has served myself and the State so well, to the dignity of Prince of the Holy

Roman Empire, for which I will be most indebted to him'. Joseph II reluctantly agreed on 16/27 February, despite the distaste of his prim mother, the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa. 'It's fairly droll', smirked Corberon, 'that the pious Empress-Queen recompenses the lovers of the non-believing sovereign of Russia.'

'Prince Grigory Alexandrovich!' Catherine acclaimed her Potemkin. 'We graciously permit you to accept the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.'¹² Potemkin was henceforth known as 'Most Serene Highness', or in Russian, 'Svetleyshiy Kniaz'. There were many princes in Russia but from now Potemkin was 'The Prince' - or just 'Serenissimus'. The diplomats presumed that this was Potemkin's golden adieu because Orlov had been granted use of his title only on his dismissal. Catherine also gave Potemkin 'a present of 16,000 peasants who can make annually five roubles a head', and then Denmark sent him the Order of the White Elephant. Was Potemkin being dismissed or confirmed in office? 'I dined at Count Potemkin's,' said Corberon on 24 March, 'It's said his credit falls, that Zavadovsky is still in intimate favour and that the Orlovs have a lot of credit to protect him.'¹³

Serenissimus desired to be a monarch as well as a prince: he already feared that Catherine would die and leave him at the mercy of the bitter Paul, from whom 'he can expect only Siberia.'¹⁴ The solution was to establish himself independently, outside Russian borders. The Empress Anna had made her favourite, Ernst Biron, Duke of Courland, a Baltic principality, dominated by Russia but technically subject to Poland. The ruling Duke was now Biron's son Peter. Potemkin decided that he wanted Courland for himself.

On 2 May, Catherine informed her ambassador to Poland, Count Otto- Magnus Stackelberg, that 'wishing to thank Prince Potemkin for his services to the country, I intend to give him the Duchy of Courland' and then suggested how he should manoeuvre. Frederick the Great ordered his envoy in Petersburg to offer help to Potemkin in this project and, on 18/29 May, he wrote warmly to him from Potsdam. Yet Catherine never pulled out the stops: Potemkin had not yet proved himself a statesman and she had to tread carefully, in Courland as well as Russia. This quest for a safe throne abroad was a leitmotif of Potemkin's career. But Catherine always did her best to keep his mind on Russia - where she needed it.¹⁵

At the beginning of April 1776, Prince Henry of Prussia arrived to con­solidate his brother Frederick's alliance with Russia. The Russo-Prussian relationship had lost its glow when Frederick had undermined Russian gains during the Russo-Turkish War. Frederick's younger brother was a secret homosexual, energetic general and clever diplomat who had helped to initiate the Partition of Poland in 1772. He was a caricature of Frederick, but fourteen years younger and bitterly jealous of him - the fate of younger brothers in the age of kings. Henry had been among the first to cultivate Potemkin. It was a mark of Potemkin's new and increasing interest in foreign affairs that he now arranged Henry's trip. 'My happiness', Prince Henry wrote to

Potemkin, 'will be great if during my stay in St Petersburg, I get the chance to prove my esteem and friendship.' The moment he arrived on 9 April he demonstrated this wish by presenting Potemkin with the Black Eagle of Prussia to add to his growing collection of foreign orders: this gave Frederick II and Potemkin the excuse to exchange flattering letters. No doubt, Prince Henry also encouraged the Courland project.¹⁶

Just as the foreigners thought Potemkin had lost his credit, the unpredictable lovers seemed to be enjoying a little Indian summer. In perhaps the best and simplest declaration of love that anyone could give, she wrote: 'My dear Prince! God nominated you to be my friend before I was even born because he created you to be for me. Thank you for the present and for the hug .. Л¹⁷ It sounds as though they were having a secret reunion - but the painful negotiations between them continued. Potemkin's eclipse and Zavadovsky's rise were widely expected. Neither Catherine nor Potemkin could take much more of this agonizing limbo. The morning after Prince Henry arrived, tragedy intervened.

At four o'clock in the morning on 10 April 1776, Grand Duchess Natalia Alexeevna, Paul's pregnant wife, went into labour. The Empress put on an apron and rushed to Natalia's apartments. She stayed with her and Paul until eight in the morning.¹⁸

The timing was inconvenient because Prince Henry had to be entertained. That night, the Empress and Prince Henry attended a violin concert by Lioli in 'the apartment of His Excellency Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin', recorded the Court Journal. Prince Henry and Potemkin discussed the alliance, as Catherine had suggested: on Frederick's instructions, Prince Henry made sure he got on well with the favourite.¹⁹ That night, it looked as if the Grand Duchess was about to deliver an heir for the Empire.

Grand Duchess Natalia had already proved a disappointment to Catherine. Though Paul appeared to love her, she was an intriguer who had not even bothered to learn Russian. Catherine and Potemkin suspected she had been having an affair with Andrei Razumovsky, Paul's closest friend and a suave womanizer. Nonetheless, on the nth, Catherine donned her apron again and rushed to do her duty, spending six hours at the bedside, then dined in her apartments with her two Princes, Orlov and Potemkin. She spent all the next day with the Grand Duchess.

The foreign diplomats felt rather cheated that 'the accouchement' had suspended 'the fall of Potemkin', as Corberon put it. The Grand Duchess was crying out in agony. The Empress was worried. 'A meal was laid inside Her Majesty's apartments but she didn't want to eat,' records the Court Journal. 'Prince ... Potemkin ate.' When he was hungry, there was not much that could put him off his food.

The doctors did what they could according to the science of solicitous butchery that then passed for medicine. Forceps were already in use in the mid-eighteenth century[25] Caesareans, though desperately dangerous, had been successfully completed since Caesar's time: the mother virtually always per­ished of infection, shock and loss of blood, but the child could be saved. Now, nothing was tried and it was too late. The baby had perished and the foetus infected the mother. Things are very bad,' Catherine wrote, possibly the next day, in a letter marked 5 a.m., already thinking about how to cope with Paul afterwards. 'I think the mother will go the same way as the child. Keep silent about it ...'. She ordered the commandant of Tsarskoe Selo to prepare Paul's apartments. 'When things are clear, I'll bring my son there.'²⁰ Gangrene set in. The stink was intolerable.

Prince Potemkin was playing cards while they awaited the inevitable denouement. 'I'm assured', said Corberon, 'that Potemkin lost ... 3,000 roubles at whist when all the world were crying.' This was unfair. The Empress and her consort had much to arrange. Catherine compiled a list of her six candidates for Paul's new wife, which she sent to Potemkin. Princess Sophia Dorothea of Wurttemberg, whom she had always wanted Paul to marry, was first of the six.²¹

At 5 p.m. on 15 April, the Grand Duchess died. Paul was half mad with grief, ranting that the doctors had lied: she must be alive still, he wanted to be with her, he would not let her be buried - and all the other fantasies that people use to deny mortal reality. The doctors bled him. Twenty minutes later, Catherine accompanied her stricken son to Tsarskoe Selo. Potemkin travelled down with his old friend, Countess Bruce. 'Sic transit gloria mundi,' Catherine commented briskly to Grimm. She had not liked Natalia, but now diplomats criticized her for the conduct of the Grand Duchess's accouchement: had she allowed her daughter-in-law to perish? The post-mortem revealed that there was an abnormality which meant Natalia could never have given birth - thus she could not have been saved by the medicine of the day. But since this was Russia, where emperors died of 'piles', Corberon reported that no one believed the official story, f

'For two days, the Grand Duke has been in inexpressible distraction,' wrote Oakes, 'Prince Henry of Prussia has scarcely quitted him.' Prince Henry, Catherine and Potemkin united to promoted Paul's immediate remarriage to the Princess of Wurttemberg. 'The choice of a Princess will not be long delayed,' reported Oakes a few days later. Amid the mourning, Catherine, Potemkin and Prince Henry appreciated the harsh reality that the Empire needed an heir, so Paul urgently needed a wife.

Paul was understandably reluctant to marry again. Such personal scruples were removed when Catherine, so loving to her adopted families, so cruel to her own, showed him Natalia's letters to Andrei Razumovsky which were found among her effects. Catherine and Potemkin arranged to send Paul on a trip to Berlin to approve the bride. The Hohenzollern brothers were delighted to have the chance to influence the Russian Heir - Princess Sophia was their niece. Paul's placidity was probably aided by his Prussophilia and worship of Frederick the Great, like his father before him. The Court reverted to its favourite sport - plotting the fall of Potemkin.²²

Grand Duchess Natalia and her still-born child lay in state at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. She wore white satin. The foetus, which turned out in the autopsy to be perfectly formed, lay gruesomely at her feet in the open coffin.²³ Serenissimus remained at Tsarskoe Selo with Catherine, Prince Henry and Paul, who was grieving not only for his wife but also for the broken illusion of his marriage. Corberon could not comprehend how both Zavadovsky and Potemkin were with the Empress: 'the reign of the latter is at its end,' he crowed, 'his position as Minister of War already given to Count Alexei Orlov,' but he worried that Potemkin seemed to be putting a very good face on matters.²⁴ Both Corberon and the British reckoned that Prince Henry was backing Potemkin against the Orlovs, contributing 'much to the retarding of the removal of Prince Potemkin whom the ribbon [the Black Eagle] has bound to his interests'.

Natalia's funeral was held on 26 April at the Nevsky Monastery. Potemkin, Zavadovsky and Prince Orlov escorted Catherine - but Paul was too dis­traught to attend. The diplomats scanned every mannerism of the leading players for political nuance, just as Kremlinologists would later dissect the etiquette and hierarchy at the funerals of Soviet General Secretaries. Then as now, Kremlinologists were frequently wrong. Here, Corberon noticed a telling sign of Potemkin's falling credit - Ivan Chernyshev, President of the Navy College, gave 'three big bows' to Prince Orlov but only 'a light one to Potemkin who bowed at him incessantly'.

Serenissimus could play the game with secret confidence. He was still in power on 14 June when Prince Henry of Prussia and Grand Duke Paul set off on their uxorious voyage to Berlin. The mission was successful. Paul returned with Sophia of Wurttemberg - soon, as Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna, to be his wife, and mother of two emperors.*

Meanwhile Prince Orlov and his brother, scenting blood, were said to be tormenting Potemkin with jokes about his imminent fall. Potemkin did not rise. He knew that, if things went according to plan, their jokes would soon not matter/⁵ 'Rumours reach us from Moscow', Kirill Razumovsky wrote to one of Potemkin's secretaries, 'that your chief is beginning to ruin himself by drinking. I don't believe it and reject it because I think his spirit is stronger than that.'²⁶ Corberon reported Potemkin sinking into 'decadence'. It was true that Potemkin shamelessly pursued pleasure at times of personal strain - debauch was his way of letting off steam.²⁷ Catherine and Potemkin discussed the future in an exchange of insults and endearments. The doomsayers were right in that these were the days when the foundations of the rest of his career were laid.

'Even now,' the Empress assured him, 'Catherine is attached to you with her heart and soul.' A few days later: 'You cut me all yesterday without any reason ...'. Catherine challenged the truth of his feelings for her: 'Which of us is really sincerely and eternally attached to the other; which of us is indulgent and which of us knows how to forget all offences, insults and oppressions?' Potemkin was happy one day and then exploded the next - out of jealousy, over-sensitivity or sheer bloody-mindedness. His jealousy, like everything else about him, was inconsistent but he was not the only one who experienced it. Catherine must have asked about another woman and Potemkin rubbed her nose in it. 'That hurt me,' she said. 'I didn't expect, and even now I don't know why, my curiosity is insulting to you.'²⁸

She demanded his good behaviour in public: 'The opinion of the silly public depends on your attitude to this affair.' It is often claimed that Potemkin was now faking his jealousy in order to make his deal while protecting Catherine's pride as a woman. He suddenly demanded Zavadovsky's removal. 'You ask me to remove Zavadovsky,' she wrote. 'My glory suffers very much from this request... Don't ask for injustices, close your ears to gossip, respect my words. Our peace will be restored.'²⁹ They were getting closer to an understanding, yet they must have decided to be apart like a couple who know they must not prolong the agony by constant proximity. Between 21 May and 3 June, Potemkin was not registered at Court.

On 20 May, Zavadovsky emerged as Catherine's official favourite, accord­ing to Oakes, and received a present of 3,000 souls. On the anniversary of the accession, he was promoted to major-general, receiving another 20,000 roubles and 1,000 souls. But now Potemkin did not mind. The storm was over: Potemkin was letting her settle down to her relationship with Zav­adovsky because husband and wife had finally settled each other's fears and demands. 'Matushka,' he thanked her, 'this is the real fruit of your kind treatment of me during the last few days. I see your inclination to treat me well...'.

However, an apologetic Potemkin could not keep away: he reappeared at Tsarskoe Selo on 3 June: 'I came here wanting to see you because I am bored without you. I saw my arrival embarrassed you ... Merciful Lady, I would go through fire for you ... If at last I'm determined to be banished from you, it would be better if it did not happen in public. I won't delay leaving even though it's like death to me.' Beneath this passionate declaration, Catherine replied, 'My friend, your imagination tricks you. I'm glad to see you and not embarrassed by you. But I was irritated by something else which I will tell you another time.'³⁰

Serenissimus lingered at Court. Poor Zavadovsky, now in love with Cath­erine, and her official companion, disappeared from the Court Journal on the day Potemkin returned: had he fled before the ebullient giant? The diplomats did not notice: as far as they were concerned, it was only a matter of time before Potemkin resigned all his offices. Their expectations appeared to be confirmed when Catherine presented the Prince with a palace of his own: the 'Anichkov house', a massive, broken-down palace in St Petersburg that had belonged to Elisabeth's favourite Alexei Razumovsky. It stood (and still stands) on the Neva, beside the Anichkov Bridge. This suggested that Pot­emkin was about to vacate his rooms in the imperial places and go 'travelling' to the spas of Europe.

In an absolutist monarchy, proximity to the throne was imperative, the sine qua поп of power. Potemkin was known to mutter that, if he lost his bed at the Palace, he would lose everything. Catherine constantly reassured her highly strung friend: 'Batinka, God is my witness, I am not going to drive you out of the Palace. Please live in it and be calm!'³¹ He later moved out of the favourite's apartment but never left the Winter Palace and never lost his access to Catherine's boudoir.

They arranged a new residence that perfectly suited their situation. For the rest of his life, his real home was the so-called 'Shepilev house', a separate little building, formerly stables, facing on to Millionaya Street, which was linked to the Winter Palace by a gallery over the archway. The Empress and Prince could walk to each other's rooms along a covered passageway from beside the Palace's chapel, in privacy and, in Potemkin's case, without dressing.

Everything was settled. On 23 June, Potemkin set off on an inspection tour of Novgorod. A British diplomat noticed some furniture being removed from his apartments in the Winter Palace. He had fallen and was off to a monastery. But the shrewder courtiers, like Countess Rumiantseva, noticed that his journey was paid for, and serviced, by the Court. He was greeted everywhere with triumphal arches like a member of the imperial family, and that could only be the result of an imperial order.³² They did not know that Catherine sent him a present for his departure, begged him to say goodbye and then wrote a series of affectionate notes to him: 'We grant you eternal and her­editary possession of the Anichkov house,' she told Potemkin, plus 100,000 roubles to decorate it. In his two years of favour, the financial figures are impossible to calculate because so often the Empress presented him with cash or presents that are unrecorded - or directly paid off his debts. But he now inhabited an unreal and opulent world in which the Croesian scale of riches was shared only by monarchs: he often received 100,000 roubles from Cath­erine when a colonel lived on 1,000 roubles a year. The Prince is estimated to have received as many as 37,000 souls, vast estates around Petersburg and Moscow and in Belorussia (the Krichev estate, for example, boasted 14,000 souls), diamonds, dinner services, silver plate and as much as nine million roubles. All this was never enough.³³

The Prince returned a few weeks later. Catherine welcomed him with a warm note. He moved straight back into his Winter Palace apartments. This confounded his critics: Serenissimus 'arrived here on Saturday evening and appeared at Court the next day. His returning to the apartments he before occupied in the Palace made many apprehensive of the possibilities of his regaining the favour he had lost.'³⁴ They would have been even more surprised to learn that he was soon correcting Catherine's letters to Tsarevich Paul in Berlin.

There is little doubt that they were playing one of their prearranged games, like celebrities today who delight in tricking the press. Having started the year afraid of losing their love and friendship in a frenzy of jealousy and regret, they had now managed to arrange their unique marriage in their own manner. Each could find his own happiness while keeping the services - personal and political, affectionate and practical - of the other. This had not been easy. Affairs of the heart cannot be drilled like regiments, or negotiated like treaties - especially those of two such emotional people. Only trust, time, nature, trial and error, and intelligence had achieved it. Potemkin now made the difficult transformation from an influential lover to 'minister-favourite' who ruled with his Empress.³⁵ They had managed to gull everyone.

The day Serenissimus returned to Court, the couple knew they would be watched for any hint of his fall or recovery. So the Prince strolled into her apartments 'with the utmost composure' and found the Empress playing whist. He sat down right opposite her. She played him a card as if nothing had changed - and told him he always played luckily.³⁶

PART FOUR

The Passionate Partnership

1776-1777

HER FAVOURITES

And Catherine (we must say thus much for Catherine)

Though bold and bloody, was the kind of thing Whose temporary passion was quite flattering Because each lover looked a sort a king

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 70

An order from Her Majesty consigned

Our young Lieutenant to the genial care Of those in office. All the world looked kind

(As it will look sometimes with the first stare, Which youth would not act ill to keep in mind,)

As also did Miss Protassoff then there, Named from her mystic office PEprouveuse, A term inexplicable to the Muse.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 84

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

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

Nonetheless, after Potemkin, her relationships with men much younger than her were obviously abnormal, but then so was her situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zavadovsky suffered like 'a stricken stag' - and the Court treated him like one. He was told to behave himself. The Empress 'respected' him but suggested that he restrain himself 'in order to extinguish the alarm.'¹⁰ What alarm? The Empress's perhaps. But surely also the hypochondriacal, nailbiting Potemkin. In any case, Zavadovsky learned that, since he was not going to be reinstated, the courtiers no longer paid him much attention. He went back to his work. One warms to Zavadovsky for his diligent state service and his romantic pain, but he also spent the next twenty years moaning to his friends about Potemkin's omnipotence and extravagance. He remained devoted to Cath­erine and did not marry for another ten years. And when he built his palace at Ekaterinodar (Catherine's Gift) - with its 250 rooms, porcelain stones, malachite fireplaces, full library - its centrepiece was a lifesize statue of Catherine.¹¹ But he was not a typical favourite because, while the Empress never gave him independent political power as she did to Potemkin, he enjoyed a distinguished career under Catherine and afterwards.[26]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potemkin's 'clever guidance' did the trick. Countess Bruce, if it was she, backed off and Catherine claimed her new mignon.²° The house-party ended. Two days later, on i June, Korsakov was officially appointed adjutant-general to the Empress. In an age of neo-Classicism, Rimsky-Korsakov, aged twenty- four, immediately struck her with his Grecian 'ancient beauty', so that she soon nicknamed him 'Pyrrhus, King of Epirus'. In her letters to Grimm, she claimed he was so beautiful that he was 'the failure of painters, the despair of sculptors'.²¹ Catherine seemed to choose alternate types because Korsakov was as elegant and artistic as Zorich has been muscular and macho: portraits show his exquisitely Classical features. He loved to sing, and Catherine told Prince Orlov that he had a voice 'like a nightingale'. Singing lessons were arranged. He was showered with gifts - 4,000 souls and presents worth half a million roubles. Arrogant, vain and not terribly clever, he was 'good-natured but silly.'²²

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bruised Catherine enjoyed an unusual six months without being in love with anyone. It was at times of unhappiness like this, commented Harris, that

Potemkin became even more powerful: did he return to Catherine's bed to comfort his friend?

It is most likely they temporarily resumed their old habits as they were to do throughout their lives: this is suggested in her letters to Potemkin, which joke about the delicious effects of the 'chemical medicines of Cagliostro'. The notorious charlatan, Count Cagliostro, rose to European fame in 1777 and became fashionable in Mittau, the Courland capital, before coming to Peters­burg at precisely this time.* Catherine raved about 'Cagliostro's chemical medicine which is so soft, so agreeable, so handy that it embalms and gives elasticity to the mind and senses - enough, enough, basta, basta, caro amico, I mustn't bore you too much .. .'.^3I This tonic is either a jocular reference to some mystical balm sold by that necromancing snake-oil salesman - or one of Potemkin's sexual specialities. Since Catherine had little patience for Cagliostro's alchemy, Freemasonry and marketing of eternal life, but a proven tolerance for Potemkin's love-making, one can guess which it was.

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

Aged only twenty to Catherine's fifty-one, this 'very handsome young man', according to an English visitor, was the gentlest, sweetest and least ambitious of Catherine's favourites. Sasha Lanskoy 'of course was not of good character', said the fast-rising Bezborodko, Catherine's secretary, but, compared to those who came later, 'he was a veritable angel'. Bezborodko, who saw everything in Catherine's office, had reason to know. Though Lanskoy did become embroiled in at least one intrigue against Serenissimus, he was also the favourite who was happiest to join the broader Catherine-Potemkin family.³¹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how the favourites rose to the imperial bedchamber and how they lived when they got there. Catherine's love affair became a Court institution on the day that it was announced in the Court Journal that the young man in question, usually a Guardsman of provincial gentry and therefore not a magnate's scion, had been appointed adjutant-general to the Empress. In several cases, as we have seen, the gentlemen were already aides-de-camp to Potemkin, an appointment that brought them into regular contact with Catherine.³⁹ So, whenever the diplomats wrote feverishly that Potemkin had presented an officer to Catherine, it could mean everything or nothing.[27] However, one senses Catherine preferred choosing her lovers from among Potemkin's staff, because they were somehow touched by a whiff of the Prince himself and they knew the form.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first advantage - and the real mark of the position - was possession of the most potent piece of real estate in all the Russians. As in all property, location was paramount. Apartments in the Empress's wing of her palaces were as valuable as those at Versailles. The new favourite would take pos­session of the beautifully decorated, green-carpeted apartment linked to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIS NIECES

There was a man, if that he was a man,

Not that his manhood could be called in question

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto VII: 36

When the five Engelhardt sisters arrived at Court in 1775, these motherless, barely educated but beautiful provincial girls were instantly transformed by their uncle into sophisticates and treated as if they were members of the imperial family - 'almost as Grand Duchesses'.¹ When Potemkin ended his relationship with the Empress of Russia, he almost at once became very close to his striking teenage niece Varvara Engelhardt. It was not long before Court gossip claimed that the degenerate Prince had seduced all five of these girls.

Now he was a semi-single man again, Potemkin immediately plunged into an imbroglio of secret affairs and public liaisons with adventuresses and aristocrats that were so intertwined that they fascinated his own times and are still difficult to unravel. 'Like Catherine, he was an Epicurean,' wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, son of one of Potemkin's adjutants, who married his great-niece. 'Sensual pleasures had an important part in his life - he loved women passionately and nothing could stand in the way of his passions.'² Now he could return to the way he preferred to live. Rising late, visiting Catherine through the covered passageway, he swung constantly between frenetic work and febrile hedonism, between bouts of political paperwork and strategic creativity, and then love affairs, theological debates, and nocturnal wassails, until dawn, at the green baize tables.

Nothing so shocked his contemporaries as the legend of the five nieces. All the diplomats wrote about it to their captivated monarchs with ill-concealed relish: 'You will get an idea of Russian morality', Corberon told Versailles under its prim new King Louis XVI, 'in the manner in which Prince Potemkin protects his nieces.' In order to underline the horror of this immoral destiny, he added with a shiver, 'There is one who is only twelve years old and who will no doubt suffer the same fate.' Simon Vorontsov was also disgusted: 'We saw Prince Potemkin make a harem of his own family in the imperial palace of which he occupied a part.' What 'scandalous impudence!' The scandal of the nieces was accepted by contemporaries as true - but did he really seduce all five, even the youngest?³

The 'almost-Grand-Duchesses' became the gilded graces of Catherine's Court, the richest heiresses in Russia and the matriarchs of many of the aristocratic dynasties of the Empire. None of them ever forgot who they were and who their uncle was: their lives were illuminated and mythologized by their semi- royal status and the prestige of Serenissimus.

Only five of the Engelhardt sisters mattered at Court because the eldest, Anna, left home and married Mikhail Zhukov before Potemkin's rise, though he looked after the couple and promoted the husband to govern Astrakhan. The next eldest, the formidable Alexandra Vasilievna, twenty-two in 1776, became Potemkin's favourite niece, his dearest friend apart from the Empress. She was already a woman when she arrived, so it was hardest for her to adapt to Court sophistication. But she was as haughty as Potemkin had been, and 'clever and strong-willed'. She used her 'kind of grandeur' to conceal 'her lack of education'.⁴ She had a head for business and politics and a talent for friendship. Her portraits show a slim brunette, hair brushed back, with high cheekbones, bright intelligent blue eyes, a broad sensual mouth, small nose and alabaster skin, graced by a lithe body and the grandness of a woman who was an honorary member of the imperial family and the confidante of its greatest statesman.

The third sister was Varvara, twenty, who charmed her way through life. 'Plenira aux chevaux d'or' - 'the fascinatress with the golden hair' - was what the poet Derzhavin called her; she was celebrated for her radiant blondeness. Even in middle age, she kept her slender figure, and her features were described by the memoirist Wiegel as 'perfect ... with the freshness of a twenty- year-old girl'. No statesman liked her sister Alexandra, she was excitable, flirtatious, capricious, hot-tempered and incessantly demanding. No one could criticize her ill-temper and bad manners when the Prince was alive, but on one occasion she pulled a friend by the hair; on another she whipped one of her estate managers. She was harsh to the pompous or corrupt but very kind to her servants⁵ - though not necessarily to her serfs. Years later, force was required to suppress a peasant revolt on her estates.

Nadezhda, fifteen, contrived to be both ginger and swarthy and must have suffered from being the ugly duckling in a family of swans, but Potemkin made her a maid-of-honour like the others. She was headstrong and irritating: Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian so Potemkin, who coined nicknames for everyone, cruelly called her 'bez-nadezhnaya' - or Hopeless. The fifth sister was the placid and passive Ekaterina, who was already the physical paragon of the family: her portrait by Vigee Lebrun, painted in 1790, shows her seraphic face surrounded by bright auburn-blonde curls, looking into a mirror. Ekaterina, wrote Segur, the French envoy, might 'have served as a model for an artist to paint the head of Venus'. Lastly, Tatiana was the youngest - aged seven in 1776 - but she grew up as good-looking and intelligent as Alexandra. After Potemkin withdrew from Catherine's alcove, he fell in love with Varvara.⁶

'Little Mother, Varenka, my soul, my life,' wrote Potemkin to Varvara. 'You slept, little fool, and didn't remember anything. I, leaving you, kissed you and covered you with the quilt and with a gown and crossed you.' It is just possible to claim that this was the letter of an uncle who has simply kissed his niece good night and tucked her in, though it really reads as if he is leaving in the morning after spending the night with her.

'My angel, your caress is so pleasurable so lovable, count my love to you and you'll see you are my life, my joy, my angel; I'm kissing you innumerable times and I think about you even more ...'. Even in the age of sensibilit6 and written by an emotional and uninhibited Prince, these sentiments were not those of a conventional uncle. Often he called her 'my honey' or 'my treasure', 'my soul, my tender lover', 'my sweetheart goddess' and 'lovable lips' and frequently signed off. 'I am kissing you from head to foot.' The letters are shamelessly sensual - and yet familial too: 'My honey, Varenka, my soul ... Goodbye, sweet lips, come over to dinner. I have invited your sisters ...'. In one letter, he told her: 'Tomorrow I'm going to the banya.' Recalling his rendezvous in the Winter Palace banya with Catherine, was he arranging to meet his niece there too?

The Prince was now thirty-seven, seventeen years older than Varvara, so, in age at least, there was nothing remarkable in their love affair. The sisters and their hulking brother, Vasily, were now at Court every day and in Potemkin's homes - the Shepilev house, the Anichkov - every evening. They attended his dinners and watched him playing cards with the Empress in her Little Hermitage. They were his most precious ornaments as well as his friends, family, entourage. As far as we know, he had no children: they were his heirs too. It was no coincidence that it was Varvara who became his mistress, for she was the family flirt, he the family hero.

The letters are clearly those of an older man and a younger woman; for example, when Potemkin told her that the Empress had invited her to a dinner, he added, 'My dear, dress yourself very well and try to be kind and beautiful,' telling to watch her 'ps and qs'. From outside town, possibly Tsarskoe Selo, he asked: 'I'm planning to come into town tomorrow ... Write to me where you plan to visit me - at the Anichkov or the Palace?' Varenka frequently saw the Empress and Serenissimus together. 'The Empress was bled today so there's no need to bother her,' he told her. 'I'm off to the Empress and then I'll come and see you.'

Varenka was in love with him too - she often called him 'my life' and worried, like all his women, about his illnesses while basking in his luxury: 'Father, my life, thank you so much for the present and the letter ... I'm kissing you a million times in my mind.' However, she began to suffer and make trouble. 'It's useless caressing me,' she said. 'Listen, I'm telling you seriously now ... if you loved me once, I ask you to forget me for ever, I've decided to leave you. I wish you to be loved by another ... though no one will love you as I've loved you ...'. Was this minx of the Engelhardt sisters jealous of another woman, for there were indeed others, or simply pretending to be?

'Varenka, you are a fool and an ungrateful rascal,' Potemkin wrote, perhaps at that moment. 'Can I say - Varenka feels bad and Grishenka feels nothing? When I come, I'll tear your ears off for it!' Was it when he arrived in a temper after this that she told him: 'Good my friend, then if it is me who has angered you, then go!' But then she said she had slept too much and perhaps that was why she was in a bad mood. So Varenka sulked and postured while Potemkin suffered the tortures of every older man who falls in love with a spoilt girl. The Empress, who invited Varvara to everything and knew of their relationship, did not mind when Potemkin was happy. Indeed she did every­thing she could to make sure that the niece was close to both of them. When one of the courtiers moved out of the palace, Potemkin asked the Empress to 'order Madame Maltiz [Mistress of the Empress's maids-of-honour] to give Princess Ekaterina's apartments to my Varvara Vasilievna'. Catherine replied: 'I'll order it...'.⁷

News of the scandalous affair reached Daria Potemkina in Moscow. The Prince's appalled mother tried to stop it. A furious Serenissimus tossed her unread letters into the fireplace. Daria also wrote to Varvara to reprimand her. 'I've received grandmother's letters,' Varvara told Potemkin, 'which made me very angry. Was this the reason for you going?' Then the girl offered herself again: 'My darling little michant, my angel, don't you want me, my adored treasure?'

When Potemkin started to spend more time in his southern provinces, Varvara sulked at Court. Catherine decided to intervene. Harris got wind of this: 'Her Majesty reproached Prince XXX with the irregularity of his conduct with his niece and the dishonour it brought...'. Harris was projecting English priggishness on to a relationship he did not understand. Catherine's indulgent teasing of Potemkin about his niece-mistress revealed their open relationship: 'Listen, my little Varenka is not well at all; it's your departure that is the cause. It's very wrong of you. It will kill her and I am getting very fond of her. They want to bleed her.'⁸

Was Varenka wasting away out of love for her uncle? Or was there another reason? The wily girl may have been playing a double game with the Prince. At the beginning, love pervaded her letters to him. Later, their tone changed. Potemkin was still in love with her - but he knew she would soon have to marry: 'Your victory over me is strong and eternal. If you love me, I'm happy, if you know how I love, you would never wish for anything else.' Now she was a woman, she did wish for more. She had already met Prince Sergei

Fyodorovich Golitsyn, another of that populous and powerful family, and had fallen in love with him.

We do not know if Potemkin was heartbroken for long, but he had resolved that the girls should make magnificent marriages, settling fortunes on them to ease the way. The end of the affair was required by family duty. 'Now all is finished,' she wrote to him. 'I waited for it every moment for a month when I began to notice your changes towards me. What have I done now when I'm so unhappy? I'm returning all your letters to you.' So it was a two-way street. 'If I behaved badly,' she wrote, 'you have to remember who was the cause of it.'

Potemkin behaved generously. In September 1778, 'he prevailed on a Prince XXX to marry her'. Prince XXX - Sergei Golitsyn - agreed. 'They were betrothed with great pomp at the Palace the day before yesterday,' observed Harris. In January 1779 as with all the Engelhardt marriages, the Empress was present when Varvara married. Varvara and Potemkin remained close for the rest of his life, and she continued to write him affectionate, flirtatious letters: 'I'm kissing your hands and asking you to remember me, father. I don't know why but it seems to me that you forget me ...', and then, like everyone else who knew him, she wrote: 'Come, my friend, as soon as possible, it's so dull without you.' She still signed herself 'Grishenkin's pussycat'.⁹

Varvara and Sergei Golitsyn were happily married and had ten children. The Empress and Serenissimus stood as godparents to the eldest, named Grigory and born that year: contemporaries suggested he was Potemkin's son. This was certainly possible. Child and man, Grigory Golitsyn bore an uncanny resemblance to his great-uncle - another mystery of consanguinity.

Following Varvara's marriage, Harris saw that 'Alexandra Engelhardt seems to have still greater power over' Potemkin. It seemed that the Prince had moved on to the niece with whom he had most in common. We do not have their love letters and no one knows what happens behind bedroom doors, but contemporaries were convinced they were lovers (though that does not mean they were). Alexandra, or 'Sashenka', 'is a young lady of a very pleasing person, of good parts and a very superior aptitude in conducting a Court intrigue', added Harris with admiration tinged with envy, for he was an avid if unsuccessful intriguer himself. He was sure Alexandra had nudged Catherine towards the room where she found Countess Bruce and Korsakov together.

Sashenka became inseparable from Empress and Serenissimus. 'If her uncle does not change his sentiments for her,' noted Harris, 'she is likely to become [Catherine's] female confidante.' So close did this relationship become that a silly legend was passed down and apparently believed among some Polish families that Alexandra was Catherine's daughter. Grand Duke Paul and Alexandria were born in 1754, so when, the story goes, Catherine gave birth to a girl instead of the expected male heir, she hid the child and replaced her with the son of a Kalmuk peasant-woman who grew up to be Emperor Paul 1.¹⁰ The simpler explanation is that she was Potemkin's niece and a fascinating woman in her own right. Sashenka's position as an unofficial member of the imperial family was still recognized forty years later.

Now she became Potemkin's hostess. A dinner given by her was a sign of his favour. Alexandra, Harris delicately told London, 'has a very notion of the value of presents'. She accepted gifts and money from the British envoy - and he recommended her to Alleyne Fitzherbert, his successor, as an intel­ligence source. She was an able businesswoman who made millions by selling grain and timber - yet she was celebrated for her generosity to her serfs." In late 1779, Potemkin's intense relationship with Sashenka ended, but they remained the closest friends.

The Prince now embarked on a long relationship with the fifth sister - Ekaterina - though again there are no love letters to prove it. They even talk of the marriage between Potemkin and his little niece with whom he is more in love than ever.'^IZ Ekaterina - 'Katinka', 'Katish' or the 'kitten', as the Empress and Potemkin called her - was the Venus in a family of them. 'Graced with her ravishing face,' wrote Vigee Lebrun, 'and her angelic softness, she had an invincible charm.' Potemkin called her his 'angel incarnate' - 'and never had anyone ever been more justly named', the Prince de Nassau-Siegen later told his wife.¹³

She was uneducated and incurious, but thoroughly seductive. Her tem­perament was like that of a blonde mulatto - eternal languor and nonchalant sexuality. 'Her happiness', recalled Vigee Lebrun, 'was to live stretched out on a canape, enveloped in a big black fur without a corset.' When visitors asked why she never wore the 'enormous diamonds ... the most sumptuous you can imagine' which 'the famous Potemkin' gave her, she lazily replied: 'To what good, for whom, for what?' She was 'the kindest of the three' niece- mistresses and 'believed in Potemkin's love so as not pain him'. She was too dreamy and passive for Potemkin, who only fell in love with passionate or shrewd women. So, while Potemkin loved her least of the three, she lasted the longest. Serenissimus declared that to be her lover was to taste the quintessential delights of the flesh, an ungallant compliment from an undoubted connoisseur.¹⁴

Late in 1780, the diplomats claimed that Potemkin's 'family harem' caused a 'diabolical row' at Court. The headstrong Varvara Golitsyna, defiantly respectable now that she was married, expressed her views on the Empress's life. This blundering tactlessness irritated Catherine. Varvara compounded her pigheaded folly by loudly proclaiming that one could hardly be knouted for telling the truth. Potemkin was furious too and sent her off to Golitsyn's estates. At this embarrassing moment, the 'angel-incarnate' Ekaterina allegedly became pregnant by her uncle. Dr Rogerson prescribed taking the waters at a spa. Serenissimus persuaded Varvara to take her sister. Corberon admired Potemkin's typical manipulation of what could have been a disaster by giving the impression that Varvara was just accompanying her sister on a medical mission instead of being exiled, and that Ekaterina was not being sent away to conceal her belly, merely going on a jaunt with the Golitsyns. By the time Ekaterina left, she was supposedly six months gone.

Catherine now made a suggestion that upset Potemkin and caused yet another row. When Ekaterina was appointed maid-of-honour in the summer of 1777, she immediately attracted the attention of Catherine and Prince Orlov's son, Bobrinsky, much to the amusement of the Empress, who joked about it in her letters to Potemkin.¹⁵ Bobrinsky fell in love with the girl. The Empress, according to Corberon, had even promised that he could marry her. Bobrinsky was an insubstantial playboy who was a victim of the birth that made him everything yet nothing. Plenty of royal bastards found brilliant careers in those days - none greater than Louis XV's Marshal Maurice de Saxe, son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and Saxony - but Bobrinsky did not and was a notorious wastrel. Did he now refuse to marry a girl pregnant by her uncle? Or did Potemkin object because he considered Bobrinsky a fool - and, worse, an Orlov? This moral, sexual and familial maze presents a little kaleidoscope of Court morals.¹⁶

Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky, who had retired to Moscow and hated Pot­emkin, scented blood in the water and arrived in town in September 1778 hoping to overthrow the Prince. Serenissimus displayed the 'highest good humour and indifference' as the two giant opponents, Cyclops and Scarface, publicly served at the Empress's table. 'It is beyond the description of my pen', observed Harris, 'to describe ... a scene, in which every passion that can affect the human mind, bore a part which, by all the actors, was concealed by the most masterly hypocrisy.' Orlov-Chesmensky was determined to make one last attempt to overthrow Serenissimus, whom, he told Catherine, had 'ruined your army': 'his only superior talent is cunning' and his only aim to 'invest himself with sovereign power'. Catherine was displeased by this but she tried to conciliate. 'Be friends with Potemkin,' she begged Orlov-Chesmensky. 'Prevail on that extraordinary man to be more circumspect in his conduct... [and] pay more attention to the duties of the great offices he fills...'.

'You know Madam,' Scarface said, 'I am your slave ... if Potemkin disturbs your peace of mind, give me your orders. He shall disappear immediately ...'. The offer to kill Potemkin may be merely diplomatic gossip, but everyone knew that Orlov-Chesmensky was quite capable of delivering. Catherine was unimpressed and this marked the last gasp of Orlov power.¹⁷

Despite the rows, Potemkin and the Empress were so involved at that time in recasting foreign policy that his political position was entirely stable. When the row got hottest, Potemkin simply absented himself in a diplomatic sulk until the Empress had calmed down. Ekaterina returned with no sign of a baby, so far as we know.

The youngest niece, Tatiana, was already 'full of spirit' when, aged twelve in 1781, she was appointed a maid-of-honour. When her uncle was in the south, she wrote him letters, in big girlish handwriting, which provide clues to the nature of Catherine and Potemkin's 'family'. She usually signed off as she did on 3 June 1785: 'I want your return with the most lively impatience.' Like everyone else, Tatiana was bored without Serenissimus: 'I don't know, my dear Uncle, when I will have the happiness to see you but those I ask tell me they know nothing and say you'll stay all winter. Ah! How long that time seems to me if it's true but I don't believe these clowns.' He gave her generous presents: 'My dear Uncle, a thousand, thousand and million thanks for your gracious present, I will never forget your kindness and beg you to continue for ever. I will do everything possible to deserve them.' She never became his mistress.¹⁸

The entire Potemkin clan was treated as a member of the extended Cather- inian family that included Lanskoy, her lover. The Empress made a fuss not just of the Engelhardt sisters but also of Potemkin's other family - his cousin Pavel Potemkin, after serving against Pugachev, became viceroy of the Caucasus, and his brother Mikhail Chief Inspector of the College of War and one of Catherine's inner circle. The Prince's stalwart nephew Alexander Samoilov, son of his sister Maria, became secretary to the State Council and a general - 'brave but useless'. Other nephews, such as Vasily Engelhardt and Nikolai Vysotsky, son of his sister Pelageya, served as Catherine's aides-de- camp, being treated almost as family.

The Empress's favourite Sasha Lanskoy was very kind to Potemkin's nieces, as we know from Tatiana's letters, which have not been cited before this. 'Monsieur Lanskoy has had all sorts of attention,' she reported innocently. In one letter, Tatiana told her uncle how the Grand Duke and Duchess 'met me in the garden - they found me very grown up and spoke to me with a lot of kindness'.¹⁹ When, a couple of years later, Ekaterina was married and pregnant, it was Lanskoy who sent Potemkin reports on the birth. 'Father,' he wrote, 'the Sovereign has kindly ordered a bow to you and to baptize the baby ... here I'm sending a letter from Ekaterina Vasilievna ...'. A few days later he told him that the Empress had a fever but the niece was feeling better each day.

There is a sense that, away from the harsh political struggles, the Empress, to some extent, succeeded in creating a patchwork family out of her - or, as she put it, 'our' - Potemkin 'relatives' and her beloved Lanskoy. She chose her family as others choose their friends. There was a symmetry between Catherine's favourites and Potemkin's nieces. When the politics allowed some serenity, she treated the nieces like daughters and he the favourites like sons. Together, they were almost the children of that unconventional, childless marriage.²⁰

Potemkin's relationships with his nieces were irregular and idiosyncratic but not unusual for his time, and certainly Catherine did not seem shocked by them. She tells in her Memoirs how, during her own childhood before leaving for Russia, she had flirted (and possibly more) with her uncle, Prince Georg- Ludwig of Holstein, who wanted to marry her. [28] Such behaviour - and worse - was not uncommon among royal families. The Habsburgs regularly married their nieces. Earlier in the century, the Regent of France, Philippe, Due d'Orleans, was supposed to have had affairs with his daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, f

Augustus the Strong, the King of Poland, Elector of Saxony and duplicitous ally of Peter the Great, set an unbeatable incestuous precedent for vigorous degeneracy that not even Potemkin could equal. Augustus, an art-loving, inpecunious and politically slippery bon vivant whom Carlyle called that 'cheerful Man of Sin, gay eupeptic Son of Belial', had, according to legend, not only fathered an heir and 354 bastards through a legion of mistresses but also supposedly made his daughter Countess Orczelska his mistress. To add insult to incest, the daughter-mistress in turn was in love with Count Rudorfski, her half-brother, another of his natural children. It was different for commoners, though in seventeenth-century France Cardinal Mazarin had made his nieces - the Mazarinettes - into the richest heiresses in France and there were rumours about his relationship with them. Meanwhile, Voltaire was having the last affair of his long life with his promiscuous, greedy niece, Madame Denis, but he kept it secret - only their correspondence revealed all. In the generation after Potemkin, Lord Byron flaunted his affair with his half- sister, and Prince Talleyrand set up house with his nephew's wife, the Duchesse de Dino.

In Russia, uncle-niece incest was much more common. The Orthodox Church turned a blind eye. Nikita Panin was rumoured to have had an affair with his niece (by marriage) Princess Dashkova - though she denied it. Kirill Razumovsky kept house at Baturin with the daughter of his sister Anna, Countess S. Apraxina, with whom he lived as man and wife. Yet the incestuous relationship of this prominent, much admired magnate was barely mentioned because it was done quietly in the country; no one 'frightened the horses'. Potemkin's sin was the openness with which he loved them. This shocked contemporaries just as it was Catherine's openness with her favourites that made her so notorious: they were the parallel lines of the same arrangement. Serenissimus regarded himself as semi-royal, so he would do what he wished and everyone could see him enjoying it.²¹

Wicked uncle Potemkin has been crucified by historians for his behaviour, but his nieces themselves were willing partners - Varvara was in love with him - and adored him throughout their lives. Far from being abused and damaged, Alexandra and Varvara enjoyed unusually happy marriages, while continuing to be close to their uncle. Ekaterina, occasional mistress for the rest of his life, was said to have merely 'tolerated' his embraces but she was a sleepy girl who 'tolerated' her husband, diamonds and everything else: that was her nature. They would surely have worshipped the protector of the family. In their letters, they always wanted to see him. Like Catherine, they found life was dull without him. No abuse is required to explain this pecca­dillo: in that place and time, it must have seemed natural.

The nieces were not his only mistresses after his withdrawal from Catherine's boudoir: Potemkin's archives are heavy with literally hundreds of unsigned love letters from unknown women who were obviously wildly in love with the one-eyed giant. There are two sorts of womanizer - the mechanical fornicator who despises his conquests, and the genuine lover of women for whom seduction is a foundation for love and friendship. Potemkin was very much the latter - he adored the companionship of women. Later, his Court was so crowded with foreigners that it was impossible to miss the identity of his paramours. But in the 1770s all we have left are yearning letters in curling feminine hands asking: 'How have you spent the night, my darling: better than me. I haven't slept for a second.' They were never satisfied with the time he gave them. 'I am not happy with you,' this one wrote. 'You have such a distracted air. There must be something on your mind ...'. His mistresses had to wait in their husband's palaces, hearing from their friends and servants exactly what Potemkin was doing: 'I know you were at the Empress's in the evening and you fell ill. Tell me how you are, it worries me and I don't know your news. Adieu, my angel, I can't tell you more, everything prevents it...'. It ends abruptly - the lady's husband had surely arrived, so she sent off the unfinished letter with her trusted maid.

These women fussed about his health, travelling, gambling, eating. His ability to attract such attention was perhaps the result of growing up sur­rounded by so many loving sisters: 'My dear Prince, can you make me this sacrifice and not give so much time to gaming? It can only destroy your health.' The mistresses ached to see him properly: 'Tomorrow there's a ball at the Grand Duke's: I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you there.' Around the same time, another woman was writing:

It's such a pity that I only saw you at a distance when I wanted so much to kiss you, my dear friend ... My God, it's a shame and I can't endure it! Tell me at least if you love me, my dear. It's the only thing that can reconcile me to myself ... I'd kiss you all the time but you'd get bored of me soon; I write to you before a mirror and it seems as if I'm chatting with you and I tell you everything that comes into my head...

In the billets-doux of these unknown women sitting in front of mirrors and pots of rouge, rolls of silk, puffs of powder, with a quill in their hands 200 years ago, we see Potemkin alive and reflected: 'I kiss you a million times before you go ... You work too much ... I kiss you thirty million times and with a tenderness that grows all the time ... Kiss me in your thoughts. Adieu, my life.'"

Yet they masked a poignant dilemma in Potemkin's unique position. No one else could ever really possess him. His affairs with his nieces made sense because he could never marry and have a normal family life. If he was unable to have children, this made it doubly suitable. He loved many - but he was married to Empress and Empire.

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 Cher- nyshev (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 minage. 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 'Chud- leigh' 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.[29] 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, f 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.t When the Duchess died, the Prince bought these objets and ordered his mechanics to assemble them in his Palace.³

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 Teyssoniere, 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.

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.. Л⁷

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^tat. 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 mon- archs 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.[30] Three families of 'Flying Geese' - the Laceys, Brownes and Keithsf - 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."" 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 clairV⁰

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.

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 protege, 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 mjght 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.

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. [31]

Peace was settled at Teschen on г/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.

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.

On 2,8 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.. Л²²

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 2,2 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. Td 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.

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 'Har- ris'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