Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

On 15 December 1777, Potemkin found his unwitting tool in this struggle. Sir James Harris arrived in Petersburg as the new minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary of the Court of St James’s. Harris was a very different species of Anglo-Saxon from Potemkin’s friends Semple and Kingston. He was a fine advertisement for the suave and cultured English gentleman. Now aged thirty-two, he had made his reputation in a most eighteenth-century manner while on his first posting to Madrid. When Spain and Britain almost went to war over some obscure islands called the Falklands, he should have returned home but instead he lingered twenty miles outside Madrid conducting a love affair. He was therefore uncannily well placed to react quickly and adeptly when the war did not occur. His career was made.¹⁸

Britain was fighting the Americans, backed by France, in their War of Independence, so Harris’s instructions from the Secretary of State for the North, the Earl of Suffolk, were to negotiate an ‘Offensive and Defensive Alliance’ with Russia, which was to provide naval reinforcements. Harris first applied to Panin, who was not inclined to help. Learning of Potemkin’s ‘inveterate hatred for Monsieur de Panin’,¹⁹ he decided to cultivate Serenissimus.

—

On 28 June 1779, Sir James screwed up his courage and approached the Prince in the Empress’s antechamber with the cheek and flattery most likely to win his attention. ‘I told him the moment was now come when Russia must act the greatest part in Europe – and he alone was adequate to direct the conduct of it.’ Harris had noticed Potemkin’s rising interest in international relations and admired his ‘very acute understanding and boundless ambition’. This was the beginning of a close friendship that confirmed Potemkin’s Anglophilia²⁰ – but never his real commitment to an English alliance.

Sir James Harris (like his French counterparts) presumed throughout his Russian mission that Potemkin’s and Catherine’s prime interest was the Anglo-French struggle, not Russia’s Turkish conflict. Potemkin took advantage of the deluded Anglocentricity of a Whig gentleman in the last days of Britain’s first world empire. So these two scenes – the rivalry of Western diplomats and the secret dreams of Potemkin and Catherine – were played out simultaneously, side by side. The only things Potemkin really had in common with Harris were love of England and hostility towards Panin.

Serenissimus was delighted by Harris’s feelers and liked the Englishman, for he impulsively invited him to dinner in his family circle at a nephew’s country house. Initially, the Englishman denounced the depravity of Catherine and the ‘dissipation’ of Potemkin, but now he almost fell in love with the exuberance of the man he proudly called ‘my friend’.²¹ Harris begged Potemkin to send ‘an armament’, a naval expedition to help Britain, in return for some yet undecided benefit, to restore the balance of power and raise Russia’s influence. The Prince seemed struck with this idea and said, ‘Whom shall we trust to draw up this declaration and to whom for preparing the armament? Count Panin has neither the will nor the capacity…he is a Prussian and nothing else; Count Chernyshev [Navy Minister] is a villain and would betray any orders given him…’.²²

Potemkin was also being wooed by Corberon and the new Prussian envoy, Goertz, both of whom described his extravagance, fun and whimsy. But the Prussian was particularly impressed by a man ‘so superior by his genius…that everyone collapses before him’. Harris won this contest: Serenissimus agreed to arrange a private audience with the Empress so that the Englishman could put his case directly.²³

On 22 July 1779, Korsakov, the favourite of the day, approached Harris after Catherine had finished her card game at a masquerade and led him through the back way into the Empress’s private dressing-room. Harris proposed his alliance to the Empress, who was friendly but vague. She saw that Harris’s ‘Armament’ would embroil Russia in the Anglo-French war. Harris asked Catherine if she would give independence to America. ‘I’d rather lose my head,’ she replied vehemently. The next day, Harris delivered a memorandum, putting his case, to Potemkin.²⁴

Potemkin’s rivalry with Panin, seemed to work to Harris’s advantage – yet it should have made him cautious. When the Council met to discuss the British proposals, Catherine through the Prince asked Harris to produce another memorandum. When they talked about Panin’s conduct, Potemkin bamboozled the Englishman by claiming that ‘he had been so little conversant in foreign affairs that a great deal of what I said was entirely new to him’. But there was no quicker student than Potemkin.