Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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.

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  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.’22

  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.

  Skip Notes

  *1 This Georg-Ludwig was also the uncle of her husband Peter III, who brought him to Petersburg during his short reign. Ironically, his orderly was young Potemkin.

  *2 On her death, Orléans’ enemies sang: ‘La pleures-tu comme mari / Comme ta fille ou ta maîtresse?’ – Do you weep for her as a husband, for your daughter or your mistress?

  13

  DUCHESSES, DIPLOMATS AND CHARLATANS

  Or in a gilded carriage

  By truly splendid tandem drawn

  With hound, companion or a jester

  Or some beauty – better yet –

  Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

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

  Sir James Harris to Viscount Stormont, 13 December 1780

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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