Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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

—