Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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 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.