Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Diplomacy was regarded as the prerogative of the king. Sometimes monarchs pursued clandestine policies that were completely contrary to those of their own ministers: in this way, Louis XV’s blundering anti-Russian Polish policy, known as ‘le Secret’, managed to waste the last vestiges of French influence in Warsaw. Ambassadors and soldiers served kings, not countries. As Potemkin’s basse-cour and military entourage were to demonstrate, this was an age of cosmopolitanism when foreigners could find service in any court, especially in diplomacy and the army. Contemporaries would have regarded our view that a man can only serve the country in which he was born as silly and limiting.

‘I like to be a foreigner everywhere,’ the Prince de Ligne, international grand seigneur, told his French mistress, ‘as long as I have you and own some property somewhere.’ Ligne explained that ‘one loses respect in a country if one spends too much time there’.⁸ Embassies and armies were filled with various nationalities who excelled in those services: Livonian barons, Italian marcheses, German counts and, the most ubiquitous of all, Jacobite Scotsmen and Irishmen. Italians specialized in diplomacy, while the Scots and the Irish excelled at war.

After the Fifteen and the Forty-Five Rebellions, many Celtic families found themselves spread across different countries: they were known as the ‘Flying Geese’ and many came to service in Russia.^*4 Three families of ‘Flying Geese’ – the Laceys, Brownes and Keiths^*5 – seem to have dominated the armies of Europe. The Keith brothers – George, the exiled Earl Marshal of Scotland, and his brother James – became Frederick the Great’s intimate friends after they had served Russia against the Turks. When General James Keith saluted an Ottoman envoy during those wars, he was amazed to hear a broad Scottish reply from beneath the turban of the Turk – a renegade Caledonian, from Kirkcaldy.⁹ At a typical battle such as Zorndorf in the Seven Years War, the commanders of the Russians, Prussians and nearby Swedes were called Fermor, Keith and Hamilton.

Beneath the turgid etiquette, the competition between the ambassadors was an unscrupulous tournament to influence policy and gather information, starring adventurers of ersatz aristocracy, pickpocketing actresses, code-breakers, galloping couriers, letter-opening postmasters, maids, temptresses and noblewomen paid by foreign governments. Most despatches were intercepted by the Cabinet Noir, a secret government bureau that opened, copied and resealed letters, then broke their cyphers. The Russian Cabinet Noir was particularly effective.^*6 Kings and diplomats took advantage of this system by not using code when they were writing something they wished a foreign government to know – this was called writing ‘en clair’.¹⁰

Rival ambassadors employed an expensive network of spies, especially domestic servants, and they spent a fortune on paying ‘pensions’ to ministers and courtiers. Secret service funds were used either to secure information (hence English gifts to Alexandra Engelhardt) or to influence policy (Catherine herself received English loans during the 1750s). These latter payments often had no effect at all on policy and generally the scale of bribery was vastly exaggerated.¹¹ Russia was reputed to be especially venal but it was probably no more so than France or England. In Russia, the main bidders for influence were England, France, Prussia and Austria. All were now to use every weapon in their arsenal to court the favour of Potemkin.

—

Europe faced three sources of conflict in 1778. France, eager to avenge the Seven Years War, was about to support the American rebels and go to war against England. (The war started in June 1778 and Spain joined the French side the next year.) However, Russia was much more concerned with the other two flashpoints. The Ottoman Sultan had never been reconciled to the terms of the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, especially the independence of the Crimea and the opening of the Black and Mediterranean Seas to Russian merchant ships. In November 1776, Catherine and Potemkin had to send an army to the Crimea to impose a khan of their choice, Shagin Giray, in the face of disturbances inspired by Constantinople. Now the Khanate was rebelling against Russia’s protégé, and the Ottoman and Russian Empires moved closer to war.