Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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 11th, 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^*1 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 Württemberg, 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.^*2

‘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 Württemberg. ‘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

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