Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  30

  The English Ambassador

  ONE NIGHT at the end of June in 1755, when the White Nights were at a peak of milky brightness and the sun still remained on the horizon at 11 p.m., Catherine was hostess at a supper and ball in the gardens of the Oranienbaum estate. Among those stepping down from a long line of arriving carriages was the newly appointed English ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. At supper, the Englishman found himself sitting next to Catherine and, as the evening progressed, each was charmed by the other’s company. “It was not difficult to talk to Sir Charles for he was extremely witty and had a great knowledge of the world, having visited most of the European capitals,” Catherine said. Later, she was told that he had enjoyed the evening as much as she.

  Before the supper, Hanbury-Williams had introduced Catherine to a young Polish nobleman, Count Stanislaus Poniatowski, who had come to Russia to act as his secretary. As she and Sir Charles talked at supper, her eyes strayed to this second visitor, whose elegance and grace made him stand out among the dancers. “The English ambassador spoke very favorably of the count,” she remembered in her Memoirs, “and told me that his mother’s family, the Czartoryskis, were a pillar of the pro-Russian party in Poland.” They had sent their son to Russia in the ambassador’s care in order to enrich his understanding of Poland’s large eastern neighbor. Because the subject of foreigners succeeding in Russia applied to Catherine personally, she volunteered an opinion. She said that, in general, Russia was “a stumbling block for foreigners,” a yardstick for measuring ability, and that anyone who succeeded in Russia could count on succeeding anywhere in Europe. She considered this rule infallible, she continued, “for nowhere are people quicker to notice weakness, absurdity, or defects in a foreigner than in Russia. One can be assured that nothing will be overlooked because, fundamentally, no Russian really likes a foreigner.”

  While Catherine was watching Poniatowski, the young man was taking careful note of her. On the journey back from Oranienbaum later that night, he had no difficulty drawing the ambassador into a long, enthusiastic discussion about the grand duchess, and the two men, one forty-seven, the other twenty-three, passed flattering impressions back and forth.

  That summer night was the beginning of a close personal and political relationship among the three. Poniatowski became Catherine’s lover, and Hanbury-Williams became her friend. For the next two and a half years, the English diplomat helped to assist her financially and then attempted to enlist her influence in the great diplomatic crisis that marked the beginning of the global Seven Years’ War.

  Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams was born to a wealthy Monmouthshire family. His youth was set in an eighteenth-century English landscape of splendid mansions, formal gardens, clipped green lawns, and portraits by Gainsborough. After Eton, he married, fathered two daughters, and entered Parliament as a Whig under the leadership of Sir Robert Walpole. He became a fixture in fashionable London drawing rooms as an elegant, witty conversationalist and a minor satirical poet. In his late thirties, Sir Charles left his wife and abandoned politics for diplomacy. In his first two posts, Berlin and Dresden, wit, charm, and elegant English manners were not enough. At the court of Frederick II, he was not to the taste of that intellectual monarch. In Dresden, wit and satire were even less in demand. Political influence at home then saw him appointed to St. Petersburg, where he was warmly welcomed because he was rumored to be bringing a large amount of gold to be used in opening doors and making friends. At Elizabeth’s court, however, the elegant Englishman found himself again in an atmosphere where his talents seemed to have little value. He discovered a single exception: a young woman on whom the arrival of a polished diplomat, coming from a world of culture and brilliant repartee, made a strong impression.

  Sir Charles had come to St. Petersburg on an important mission. A treaty, originally made in 1742, which traded English payments in gold for the promise of Russian support in any continental war involving England, was on the point of expiring. Simultaneously, fear of Frederick of Prussia’s belligerent reputation had stirred King George II’s concern for his own small, almost defenseless, north German electorate of Hanover. Hanbury-Williams’s mission was to renew the subsidies treaty, which would guarantee Russian intervention if Prussia invaded Hanover. Specifically, the British government wanted Russia to concentrate fifty-five thousand men at Riga with the threat that they would march west into Frederick’s province of East Prussia if the Prussians moved against Hanover.

  The previous British ambassador, who had attempted to renew this treaty, had found himself at a loss at Elizabeth’s court, where diplomatic matters were often settled in a quick conversation at a ball or a masquerade. At his own request, this flustered diplomat withdrew, and a new man, considered better equipped to cope with the nuances of the post, was sought. Charles Hanbury-Williams, who never willingly missed a ball or a masquerade, was considered a good choice. He had proved himself a man of the world, young enough to be attractive to women, but sufficiently mature to remain faithful to his duties. He was not long in St. Petersburg, however, before finding that he could do little better than his predecessor. “The empress’s health is very bad,” he reported in his first dispatch. “She suffers from a cough and from breathlessness; she has water on the knee and dropsy—but she danced a minuet with me.” Hanbury-Williams continued to try, but he had misjudged his quarry. However much it may have amused Elizabeth to listen to the talk of this sophisticated Englishman, the moment he attempted to speak to her of serious matters, she smiled and walked away. As a woman, she was responsive to any compliment; as empress she was deaf. Since his arrival, Sir Charles had not advanced a step.

  He looked elsewhere. When he turned to Peter, the future ruler, he was rebuffed again. In their first conversation, he discovered the heir to the throne’s obsessive admiration of the king of Prussia. Nothing could be done; he saw that he would be wasting time with the nephew as he had with the aunt. He had come to supper at Oranienbaum that summer evening believing that his mission had failed. Then he found himself seated next to the grand duchess. He discovered a natural ally, a cultured European able to appreciate intelligent conversation, who took a keen interest in books, and who also nourished a dislike of the king of Prussia.

  When Sir Charles first saw Catherine, he was as captivated by her appearance as he was impressed by her erudition. Catherine’s affair with Sergei Saltykov was well known and had marked her as a susceptible young woman. A cavalier himself in his earlier years, he might briefly have thought of following a romantic path. He quickly confronted reality, however, and recognized that, as a middle-aged widower in less than perfect health, this was no longer open to him. “A man at my age would make a poor lover,” he advised a minister in London who had suggested that approach. “Alas, my scepter governs no more.” He cast himself, instead, as an avuncular, even paternal, figure to whom Catherine could turn for personal or political advice. He left the other path open for his young secretary, Stanislaus Poniatowski.

  Catherine found Hanbury-Williams stimulating and sophisticated; when she learned he had come to renegotiate the alliance between Russia and England aimed at Prussia, her admiration increased. For his part, the ambassador knew Catherine to be a friend of Bestuzhev and therefore a potentially valuable ally. The friendship ripened. When, at a ball, Sir Charles admired her dress, she had a copy made for his daughter, Lady Essex. Catherine began writing letters to him, telling him about her life. This contact with an older man whose intelligence and sophistication she respected was in a sense a reprise of her adolescent relationship with Count Gyllenborg, for whom she had written her “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.” In these lengthy epistolary exchanges, she was ignoring the fact that it was indiscreet for a Russian grand duchess to be involved in private correspondence with a foreign ambassador.

  Exchanging letters was not the only means Hanbury-Williams employed in his attempt to influence Catherine. He discovered the financial difficulties in
which she was mired. New debts had been added to those left behind by her mother. She spent money freely—on clothes, on entertainment, and on her friends. She had learned the power of money to persuade and buy allegiance. She was never guilty of outright bribery; instead, her largesse was driven by her desire to please and be surrounded by smiling faces. When Hanbury-Williams offered financial assistance, using funds from the British treasury, she accepted. The amount Catherine borrowed or took from him is unknown, but it was considerable. Hanbury-Williams had been given carte blanche by his government and had opened a credit account for her with the English consul in St. Petersburg, the banker Baron Wolff. Two receipts signed by the grand duchess bear the dates July 21 and November 11, 1756; the sums totaled fifty thousand rubles. The loan of July 21 was not the first; in asking for it, Catherine wrote to Wolff, “I have some hesitation in coming to you again.”

  Catherine knew that accepting money from the English ambassador entailed risks, but she also knew that this game was played by everyone at the Russian court. If she allowed herself to be bribed in order to please others, she was only part of a universal corruptibility that was a feature of politics and government in every state in Europe. Money bought friendships, loyalties, and treaties. Everyone in St. Petersburg was corruptible, including the empress herself. When Hanbury-Williams was beginning his effort to persuade the empress to agree to a new Anglo-Russian treaty, he had informed London that Elizabeth had begun to build two palaces but lacked enough money to finish them. The treaty would guarantee Russia an annual payment of one hundred thousand pounds, but Sir Charles thought that an additional contribution to Elizabeth’s private purse would bind her even more securely to England. “In a word, all that has been given so far has served to buy Russian troops,” he said. “Whatever may be further given will serve to buy the empress.” London approved the additional sum, and Sir Charles was able to report that the treaty negotiations were progressing smoothly. He believed that the same approach would confirm the goodwill and anti-Prussian sentiments of the charming grand duchess.

  31

  A Diplomatic Earthquake

  THE REASON FOR Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams’s mission to Russia in 1755 was the political requirement that England defend the electorate of Hanover. In the middle of the eighteenth century, two constant factors dictated British diplomacy and military strategy: one was the permanent hostility of France, whether the two countries were actually at war or passing through an interlude of peace; the other was the need to defend the small, landlocked, north German electoral state. This obligation arose from the fact that the king of England was also the elector of Hanover. In 1714, the fifty-four-year-old elector, George Lewis, had been persuaded by Parliament to accept the British throne, thereby ensuring the supremacy of the Protestant religion in the British Isles. George had become King George I of Great Britain while keeping his German electorate and title. This personal union of the island kingdom and the continental electorate in the figure of the monarch continued until 1837, when, on the coronation of Queen Victoria, it was quietly laid aside.

  It was never an easy fit. George I and later his son, George II, greatly preferred their little electorate with its smiling, obedient population of three-quarters of a million people, and no outspoken, interfering Parliament. George I never learned to speak English, and both he and his son frequently went home to Hanover and remained for long periods.

  The electorate was always an easy prey for its continental neighbors. Defending Hanover from aggressive neighbors was almost impossible for England, a maritime power lacking a large army. Most Englishmen were convinced that Hanover was a millstone around England’s neck and that Great Britain’s larger interests were regularly sacrificed to those of the electorate. There was no escape, however; Hanover had to be protected. Since only the army of a continental ally could do this, England had entered into long-term alliances with Austria and Russia. For many decades, this arrangement had worked.

  In 1755, fear of rising Prussian belligerence stirred King George II to worry that his brother-in-law, Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick’s wife, Sophia, was George’s sister), might be tempted to invade Hanover as he had already invaded Silesia. It was to deter such a Prussian adventure that England had proposed renewal of the treaty with Russia which Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had come to St. Petersburg to negotiate. When Count Bestuzhev signed the treaty for Russia in September 1755, Sir Charles was exuberant.

  Hanbury-Williams’s self-congratulation was premature. News that England and Russia were about to sign a new treaty had alarmed the king of Prussia, who, it was said, feared Russia more than he feared God. Appalled by the prospect of fifty-five thousand Russians poised to march against him from the north, he instructed his diplomats to come to terms immediately with Great Britain. They did so by reviving an agreement presumed defunct. Before negotiating with Russia, England had first attempted to ensure the integrity of Hanover by negotiating directly with Prussia. Frederick had rejected this proposal, but now he hastily resurrected and accepted it. On January 16, 1756, Great Britain and Prussia mutually pledged that neither would invade or threaten the other’s territories. Instead, should any aggressor disturb “the tranquillity of Germany”—a phrase vague enough to cover both Hanover and Prussia—they would unite to oppose the invader. The potential “invaders” were France and Russia.

  This treaty led to a diplomatic earthquake. Allying herself with Prussia cost England her alliance with Austria, as well as implementation of her new treaty with Russia. And when word of the Anglo-Prussian treaty reached Versailles in February 1756, France repudiated her own alliance with Prussia, clearing the way for a French rapprochement with her historic antagonist, Austria. On May 1, Austrian and French diplomats signed the Convention of Versailles, by which France agreed to come to Austria’s aid should Austria be attacked.

  Six months earlier, these reversals would have been unthinkable; now they were reality. Frederick had overturned his own alliances, forcing other powers to realign theirs; when they did, a new diplomatic structure rose up in Europe. Once these arrangements were made, Frederick was ready to act. On August 30, 1756, his superbly trained, well-equipped Prussian army marched into Saxony. The Prussians quickly overwhelmed their neighbor, and then incorporated the entire Saxon army into their own ranks. Saxony was an Austrian satellite, and the Franco-Austrian treaty, the ink scarcely dry on its pages, now inexorably brought Louis XV to Maria Theresa’s aid. And once Russia’s longtime ally Austria was involved, Empress Elizabeth joined Austria and France against Prussia. This maneuvering had not improved Hanover’s security, however. Freed from the threat of seizure by Prussia, the electorate now stood exposed to danger from both France and Austria.

  When Count Bestuzhev sent a note to the British embassy informing Hanbury-Williams of Russia’s adherence to the new anti-Prussian alliance between France and Austria, the ambassador was stunned. The newly signed treaty with England, which he had just negotiated with Bestuzhev, had to be set aside, although it was never formally repudiated.* Hanbury-Williams found himself in the topsy-turvy position of being expected by London to further the interests of Britain’s new ally, Frederick of Prussia, whom he had originally been sent to Russia to undermine. In this way, the grand reversal of alliances among the European powers was mirrored in miniature by the reversal Hanbury-Williams was forced to make in his own objectives and efforts in St. Petersburg.

  The Englishman did his best. He became a diplomatic acrobat. Frederick had no envoy in St. Petersburg; Hanbury-Williams secretly offered to take on the role himself. By using the diplomatic pouch destined for his colleague the British ambassador in Berlin, he would endeavor to keep the Prussian king informed of what was happening in the Russian capital. He would also attempt, through his St. Petersburg connections, to ensure that no serious Russian military effort would be made in the coming war. The most important of these connections, now that Bestuzhev was lost to him, was Catherine. He and the grand duchess had shared an
intimate correspondence and many sparkling conversations; he had given her thousands of pounds; he boasted to the Prussians that she was his “dear friend”; he suggested that he could use her to delay any Russian advance.

  The ambassador was betraying his confidante. Catherine knew that the Anglo-Russian treaty was moribund, but she did not know that her friend was secretly assisting Russia’s enemy, and that he had used her name as a potential ally in this intrigue. He was deluding everyone, including himself. In January 1757, Catherine expressed her true feelings in a letter to Bestuzhev: “I have heard with pleasure that our army will soon … [march]. I beg you to urge our mutual friend [Stepan Apraksin] when he has beaten the King of Prussia, to force him back to his old frontiers so that we may not have to be perpetually on guard.”