Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Duchess also left a more tawdry reminder of herself around Potemkin’s person. When she returned in 1779, still in favour, she brought a plausible young Englishman who claimed to be an army officer, expert in military and commercial affairs. ‘Major’ James George Semple had indeed served in the British army against the Americans and he certainly was a specialist in commerce, though not of the kind he suggested. (A portrait in the British Museum shows him sporting an insolent expression, high hat, ruffled white shirt and uniform – the paraphernalia of the mountebank.) When he arrived in Russia, Semple was already a celebrated rogue known as ‘the Northern Impostor and the Prince of Swindlers’. Indeed a few years later, a book was published about him: The Northern Hero – Surprising Adventures, Amorous Intrigues, Curious Devices, Unparalleled Hypocrisy, Remarkable Escapes, Infernal Frauds, Deep-Laid Projects and Villainous Exploits. Semple was married to a cousin of Kingston’s, but he was in the debtor’s jail at Calais when she was arranging her second Russian jaunt. She bought him out of the jail and invited him to travel with her to Petersburg. The jailbird probably seduced the Ducal Countess.⁴

Potemkin was immediately charmed. The Prince always relished swashbuckling heroes and Semple, like all rascals, lived on his blarney. In his early days as a statesman, when he was getting to know Westerners for the first time, Potemkin was certainly careless about his foreign friends, but he always preferred amusing hucksters to boring aristocrats. The Northern Hero and Prince of Swindlers joined the entertaining Anglo-French riffraff in the basse-cour, including an Irish soldier of fortune named Newton, who was later guillotined in the Revolution; the Chevalier de Vivarais, a defrocked French priest who was accompanied by his mistress,⁵ and a mysterious French adventurer called the Chevalier de la Teyssonière, who helped Corberon advance French interests.⁶ It is a shame that the era’s premier adventurer, the cultivated and witty Casanova, had arrived too early for Potemkin: they would have enjoyed each other.

—

The international circus of the basse-cour was a grotesque microcosm of the cosmopolitan world of diplomacy. Serenissimus, while working seriously on military and southern affairs, now began to take an interest in Nikita Panin’s responsibility – foreign affairs. As Countess Rumiantseva had shrewdly observed to her husband after the end of Potemkin’s affair with Catherine, ‘The impulsiveness, which excited him once, is over. He leads an absolutely different life. Doesn’t play cards in the evenings; working all the time…You’ll never recognize him…’.⁷

The Prince was a diplomatic neophyte, but he was well qualified for the nature of international affairs at that time. The diplomatic world of the eighteenth century is often described as an elegant ballet in which every dancer knew their steps down to the minutest detail. But this was something of an illusion for, if the steps were familiar, the music, by late in the century, was no longer predictable. The ‘Old System’ had been overturned by the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of 1756. The guiding light of diplomacy was the ruthless self-interest of raison d’état. All depended on the power of the state, measured in population, territorial aggrandizement and size of army. The ‘balance of power’, maintained by the ever present threat of force, was really an argument for the relentless expansion of the Great Powers at the cost of lesser ones: it often meant that, if one Power made gains, the others had to be compensated for them, as Poland discovered in 1772.

Ambassadors were usually cultivated aristocrats, who, depending on distance from their capitals, possessed independence to pursue royal policy in their own way, but the initiatives of the diplomats could be recklessly out of kilter with government policy: treaties were sometimes signed by diplomats who were then disowned by their own ministries. This meant that policy developments were slow and ponderous as couriers dashed back and forth along muddy, potholed roads, dodging footpads and staying at the cockroach-infested, rat-teeming taverns. Diplomats liked to give the impression of being aristocratic amateurs. It was quite common for example for the British and French ambassadors to Paris and London to swap houses and servants until their missions were over. The Foreign Offices of the eighteenth century were tiny: the British Foreign Office in the 1780s, for example, boasted a mere twenty employees.