Catherine the Great & Potemkin
Page 47
Krichev was another world from the salons of Petersburg, yet alone the chambers of Lincoln’s Inn, but it must have been even more of a shock to Bentham’s recruits from England. Bentham moved into what was called ‘Potemkin’s house’ but which was really just a ‘tottering barn’.18 The enthusiastic and arrogant Englishman had landed at one of Europe’s crossroads: not only did the riverways converge there, but the place was a cultural cauldron too. ‘The situation is picturesque and pleasant, the people…quiet and patient to the last degree…industrious or idle and drunken.’ There were forty poverty-stricken Polish noblemen who worked on the estate ‘almost as slaves’. It teemed with different races and languages.
This was all most confusing and alarming to a newly arrived artisan from Newcastle, who had never travelled before. ‘The heterogeneous mixture of people here is surprising,’ Beaty, a Geordie heckler, confessed. There were Russians, Germans, Don Cossacks, Polish Jews – and the English. At first ‘I thought it a collection of the strangest sounds that ever invaded my English ears.’ The Jews, from whom ‘we had to buy all the necessities of life’, spoke German or Yiddish.19 Beaty could only muse that ‘on a Market Day when I behold such an odd Medley of Faces and Dresses, I have more than once started and wondered what brought me amongst them’.20
Samuel’s responsibilities over all these people were equally extensive: firstly he was now the ‘Legislator, Judge, Jury and Sheriff’ of the local serfs. Then, ‘I have the direction and putting in order of all the Prince’s fabriks here.’ The factories were lamentable.21 So Bentham offered to take them over. ‘Extremely agreeable,’ replied Potemkin from Tsarskoe Selo, professing himself ‘charmed with your activity and the project of your obliging responsibility’.22
The Prince was always thinking of improving his cities and warships. Disproving his supposed allergy to detail or to seeing his projects through, he turned to the cordage factory: ‘They tell me the cordage…is scarcely fit for use.’23 He begged Bentham to improve it and sent him an expert from Kronstadt. When Samuel’s friends Korsakov and the sailor Mordvinov, both senior officers of Potemkin’s, visited on the way to Kherson, Bentham reported to Serenissimus that he was supplying them with whatever they needed for their shipbuilding.24 After almost two years, Samuel was doing so well with his mills that he suggested a deal to the Prince: he would actually take over the less successful factories for ten years while Potemkin kept the profitable ones. All the buildings and materials would be supplied along with 20,000 roubles (about £5,000) of capital, which he would gradually repay. In the deal signed in January 1786, Serenissimus asked for no income whatsoever during the ten years – he simply hoped to receive the factories back in a profitable state at the end. His real interest was not profit but imperial benefit.25
One of Bentham’s suggestions was to import potatoes and plant them at Krichev: Potemkin approved. The first twelve acres were sown in 1787 and a ‘much pleased’ Prince kept growing them on his other estates afterwards. Some histories claim that Potemkin and Bentham brought potatoes to Russia. This is not true – Catherine arranged their import during the 1760s, but the Prince was the first to cultivate them and it was probably thanks to him that they became part of the staple Russian diet.26
Bentham’s main task was to build ships for Potemkin – all sorts, any sort at all. ‘I seem to be at liberty to build any kind of ship…whether for War, Trade or Pleasure.’ The Prince wanted gun frigates for the navy, a pleasure frigate for the Empress, barges for the Dnieper trade and ultimately luxury barges for the Empress’s long-planned visit to the south. It was a tall if not towering order. There was a priceless moment of Potemkinish exasperation when Bentham tried to pin down the Prince about the ship design. Did Serenissimus want one mast, two masts, and how many guns? ‘He told me by way of ending the dispute that there might be twenty masts and one Gun if I pleased. I am a little confused…’.27 What inventor could want for a more indulgent, and maddening, master?
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Soon Samuel realized he needed help. His ships required rowers, whether peasants or soldiers. This was no problem: the Prince delivered, as if by magic, a battalion of Musketeers. ‘I give you the command,’ wrote Serenissimus from Petersburg in September. Potemkin was always thinking about his beloved navy: ‘My intention, sir, is that they shall be capable one day of serving at sea, therefore I exhort you…to qualify them for it.’28 Bentham naturally had no idea how to command soldiers or speak Russian, so when a major asked for orders on parade, Samuel replied: ‘Same as yesterday.’ How was this manoeuvre to be conducted? ‘As usual,’ ordered Bentham.29 There were only ‘two or three Sergeants’ who could write, yet alone draw, plus the two leather-makers from Newcastle at Orsha, a young mathematician from Strasbourg, a Danish brass-founder and a Scottish watchmaker.30 Samuel bombarded the Prince with requests for artisans: ‘I’m finding it very difficult to recruit people of talent,’31 he complained in one unpublished letter. The Prince replied that he could hire workmen on whatever terms he liked.
The Prince’s obsessional Anglomania now exploded into one of the most energetic recruitment campaigns ever designed to lure British experts to distant climes. Anglophilia ruled Europe.32 In Paris, men sported ‘Windsor collars’ and plain frockcoats, ladies drank Scotch whisky, took tea while betting on jockeys at the races and playing whist.*2 Potemkin did not care about the details but he knew that he wanted only Englishmen, not only to drive the looms of Krichev but also to run his botanical gardens, dairies, windmills and shipyards from the Crimea to Krichev. The Benthams placed advertisements in English newspapers. These advertisements unconsciously catch the capricious demands of Potemkin. ‘The Prince wants to introduce the use of beer,’ announced one. Or he ‘means to have an elegant dairy’ with ‘the best of butter and as many kinds of cheese as possible’. Soon the advertisements had expanded to anyone British: ‘Any clever people capable of introducing improvements in the Prince’s Government might meet with good encouragement,’ read one Bentham advertisement in Britain. Finally Potemkin just declared to Samuel that he wished to create a ‘whole colony of English’ with their own church and privileges.33 Potemkin’s Anglophilia of course extended to his subordinates. Local landowners wanted their peasants trained with English smiths so Dashkov’s serfs were sent over to learn English carpentry.34 After Potemkin’s future Admiral Mordvinov married Henrietta Cobley, Nikolai Korsakov confessed to Samuel that he too ‘was exceedingly desirous of an English wife’.35 Gardeners, sailors and artisans were not enough. The Russians wanted wives too.
Bentham’s budget was limitless. When he bothered Serenissimus to fix some bounds on the credit, ‘ “What is necessary” was the only answer I could get.’ Sutherland, Potemkin’s banker, simply arranged the credit in London.36 Samuel Bentham immediately saw opportunities for him and his brother Jeremy to trade in goods between England and Russia and to be the middlemen of Potemkin’s recruiting campaign. Within weeks of the first advertisements, Samuel was sending Jeremy shopping lists by the dozen: one, for example, demanded a millwright, a windmill expert, a cloth-weaver, barge-or boat-builders, shoemakers, bricklayers, sailors, housekeepers, ‘two under-maids, one to understand cheese-making, the other, spinning and knitting.’37
Father and brother, Jeremiah and Jeremy Bentham, enthusiastically scoured Britain. Old Jeremiah excelled himself – he called on Lord Howe at the Admiralty, then invited Under-Secretary of State Fraser and two recently returned Russian veterans, Sir James Harris and Reginald Pole Carew, to his house to discuss it. He even roped in the former Prime Minister Shelburne, now first Marquess of Lansdowne38 – ‘all to procure shipwrights to be sent to my son’s assistance’. The Marquess thought Potemkin was interesting but untrustworthy and his compliments about the Bentham brothers were distinctly back-handed: ‘Both your sons are too liberal in their temper to adopt a mercantile spirit and your Sam’s mind will be more occupied with fresh inventions than with calculat
ing compound interest which the dullest men Russia can perhaps do as well…’, wrote Lansdowne from Weymouth on 21 August 1786. ‘He is spending his best years in a changeable country and relying on men of changeable tempers.’39
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The whole frantic project now assumes some of the absurdity of an eighteenth-century situation comedy in which a mixed group of philosophers, sailors, phoneys, hussies and workmen are dropped without a word of any foreign language into a multilingual Belorussian village owned by an often invisible but impulsive Serenissimus. Each of these characters turns out to have a completely different agenda to the one assigned by the Benthams.
Jeremy became possessed by a sort of Catherinian graphomania and kept writing to Samuel with interminable superfluous details on a parade of candidates for posts varying from chief of botanical gardens to milkmaid: ‘With the respect to the Botanist, I conceive there cannot be the least difficulty in finding a man of science’ and then debated the costs of ‘The Dairy Lady’. Finally, Jeremy recruited a Logan Henderson to run the said botanical garden. Naturally such an adventurous expedition attracted a motley crew: Henderson for example was a Scotsman who claimed to be an ‘expert’ on gardens, steam-engines, sugar-planting and phosphorous fireworks. He signed up, promising also to deliver his two nieces, the Miss Kirtlands, as dairymaids. Dr John Debraw, the ex-apothecary of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and revered author of that significant work, Discoveries on the Sex of Bees (just published to mixed reviews), signed up as Potemkin’s experimental chemist along with gardeners, millwrights, hecklers, mostly from Newcastle or Scotland: the first tranche reached Riga in June 1785.
Jeremy Bentham longed to join Samuel in Belorussia: he saw not only mercantile opportunities but peace in which to work on his treatises, and statesmen like Potemkin who could put his utilitarian ideas into practice. (His utilitarian theory measured the success of rulers by their ability to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number.) Potemkin’s estates sounded like a philosopher’s dream. Jeremy decided to bring out another group of his recruits. By the time he set off, Samuel was exasperated with his brother’s ludicrous letters. Things really deteriorated when the philosopher began to write directly to the Prince himself suggesting quixotic ideas and telling him about gardeners and chemists: Potemkin’s archives contain many of these unpublished works of Jeremy Bentham. They are priceless both as historic documents and as works of comic entertainment: the phrase ‘mad professor’ comes to mind.
Jeremy planned to buy a ship to bear the Prince’s artisans, proposing to name it The Prince Potemkin. Then to business: ‘Here, Monseigneur, is your Botanist. Here is your milkmaid. The milk is good in Cheshire, county of cheese…’. Mademoiselle Kirtland, the milkmaid who was also an admirable chemist, stimulated this Benthamite exposition of feminism: ‘Knowledgeable women so often lose the perfection of their own sex by acquiring those of ours…That is scarcely true with Mademoiselle Kirtland.’ The philosopher really wanted to sell Potemkin a ‘machine de feu’ or, even better, the latest steam-engine of Watts and Bolton, explaining that these were mechanisms ‘which play by the force of water reduced to vapours in boiling. Of all the machines of modernity…the easiest to construct is the machine de feu’, but the hardest and costliest was the Watts and Bolton. If the Prince did not want the steam-engine, how about setting up a printing press in the Crimea with a Mr Titler? What would this printing press publish? Jeremy suggested Project of the Body of the Laws by one J. Bentham. Jeremy apologetically signed himself, ‘Here for the fourth time, Your Eternal Correspondent’.40
Samuel panicked. Serenissimus hated long letters and wanted results. Colonel Bentham feared his career was being ruined by the ‘Eternal Correspondent’ so he told off his bungling brother. The Prince would have found the details ‘troublesome’ and ‘expected to hear no more until the people made their appearance’. Samuel was anxious because Potemkin had not replied: ‘I fear the worst…I hope to lay the blame on your over-zeal.’41 But the philosopher finally received a courteous letter from the Prince via the Russian Embassy in London. ‘Sir,’ the Prince wrote to Jeremy, ‘I have to thank you for the care you have given yourself in the execution of the Commissions…on my account. The time did not permit me to come to a resolution sooner…but now I have to beg you to engage Mr Henderson to accompany the Persons…’. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham’s long but brilliant letters were exactly the sort of fascinating distraction that the Prince relished: he sent word he enjoyed them immensely and was having them translated into Russian.42
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Jeremy Bentham was most proud of recruiting a landscape gardener for Krichev named John Ayton, because, as he boasted to his father, ‘our Gardener is Nephew to the King’s Gardener at Kew’.43 This was a time when there was an aristocracy of gardeners too. Yet Ayton did not become the Prince’s star gardener. Potemkin’s green-fingered factotum had already arrived in Russia in 1780, at about the same time as Samuel Bentham. His name was William Gould, a protégé of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the master of the English garden. During the 1770s, Catherine and Potemkin simultaneously became avid devotees of the English garden. In no other field was the Prince’s Anglomania so marked as in his addiction to creating English gardens wherever he was.
The natural, picturesque (but intricately planned) chaos of the English garden, with its lakes, grottoes, landscaping and ruins, was now gradually vanquishing the formal precise French garden. The fortunes of the gardens followed those of the kingdoms: when Louis XIV dominated Europe, so did French gardens. As France declined and Britain conquered its empire, its gardens also triumphed. ‘I adore English gardens,’ Catherine told Voltaire, ‘with their curved lines, pente-douces, ponds like lakes (archipelagoes on dry land); and I despise deeply straight lines and identical allées…In a word, anglomania is more important to me than “plantomania”.’44
The Empress approached her new gardening hobby with her usual levelheaded practicality, while Potemkin vaulted it with his typical obsessional singlemindedness. In 1779, the Empress had hired John Bush and his son Joseph to landscape her gardens at Tsarskoe Selo. On her other estates, she hired other green-fingered Englishmen with garden names – Sparrow and Hackett. It was a mark of his Anglomania that Potemkin clearly regarded an English gardener as the equal of a Russian aristocrat: such was his respect for these lords of the flowerbed that he dined at the Bushes’ with two of his nieces, one of their husbands Count Skavronsky, and three ambassadors, a social puzzle that alarmed a supposedly more democratic English visitor, Baroness Dimsdale.45 She observed that Potemkin relished Bush’s ‘excellent dinner in the English taste’ and ate as much as he could. (Serenissimus so relished English cooking that, when his banker Sutherland gave him roast beef for dinner, he took the rest home with him.) Soon Potemkin’s gardening requirements were so great that he recruited Ayton from England and borrowed Sparrow from Catherine.46
None of these became as famous as Potemkin’s Gould, who is still celebrated in distant corners of Russia and Ukraine today: in 1998, this author heard his name in places as far apart as Petersburg and Dneipropetrovsk. Gould was lucky to be recruited by a man described by the Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) as ‘one of the most extravagant encouragers of our art that modern times can boast’. But Potemkin was also fortunate to find his gardening alter ego – the capable and grandiose creator of massive English gardens across the Empire that defied distance and imagination.
Gould employed a staff of ‘several hundred assistants’ who travelled in Potemkin ’s wake.47 He planned and executed gardens in Astrakhan, Ekaterinoslav, Nikolaev and the Crimea, including on the estates on the lush Crimean coast at Artek, Massandra and the site of the Alupka Palace.*3 Local cognoscenti still breathe his name with reverence two centuries after he last hoed.48 Potemkin discovered the ruins of one of Charles XII’s castles, perhaps near Poltava. He not only had it repaired but had Go
uld surround it with yet more English gardens.
Gould’s extraordinary speciality was building English gardens overnight, on the spot, wherever Potemkin stayed. The Encyclopaedia of Gardening, which gave one of Gould’s junior gardeners, Call, as its source, claims that wherever Potemkin stopped he would set up a travelling palace and Gould would create an English garden, composed of ‘shrubs and trees, divided by gravel walks and ornamented with seats and statues, all carried with his cavalcade’. Most historians have presumed that the stories of Potemkin’s instant English gardens were simply legends – it was surely impossible that Gould travelled with a convoy of oak trees, rockeries and shrubberies. But here Legend and Reality merge: the State Archives in Petersburg, which contain Potemkin’s accounts, show that Gould constantly travelled with Potemkin to places where we know from other sources that these gardens were indeed laid out in a matter of days. There was something of Haroun al-Rashid about Potemkin. He was, as Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun put it, ‘a sort of enchanter such as one reads about in the Arabian Nights.‘*4