Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin’s tactics were telling on Panin. Both believed the other was receiving bribes. This led to a tumultuous confrontation at the Council when Potemkin accused Panin of accepting French money or, as he put it, ‘the portraits of Louis XVI’ are excellent to ‘bet at whist’. Panin exploded that if he needed them, guineas were easier to get. Presumably Panin believed Potemkin was getting more than that laughable £50,000. The Empress was called to restore the peace.³⁹

Harris decided to find out if Serenissimus really supported an English alliance, so he bribed ‘the favourite secretary of Prince Potemkin…also the secretary to the Empress’. This was probably Alexander Bezborodko, who was becoming Catherine’s leading factotum in foreign affairs as Panin dwindled. Stormont agreed on the offer of £500, though he added that it was rather a lot. When it came to it, Harris was fleeced of nearer £3,000, though he did get closer to the reality of Potemkin’s policy. Bezborodko revealed that the monarchs of Europe, from Frederick to Joseph, were bombarding Potemkin with offers of thrones and money. No offer swayed him. He was not really zealous in the English cause, except when roused by rivalry with Panin. The ‘spy’ added that Potemkin lived by the ‘impulse of the moment’ and was quite capable of ‘adopting the political principles of every country’ but was keenest at that moment on Austria. There, at last, was the truth.⁴⁰

The diplomats had already heard Potemkin talking about real plans in the south. Even when discussing English fleets, Harris observed that Potemkin’s ‘mind is continually occupied with the idea of raising an Empire in the East’ and it was he ‘alone who heated and animated the Empress for this project’.⁴¹ Catherine was indeed infected with Potemkin’s exciting visions. When she talked to Harris, she ‘discoursed a long while…on the ancient Greeks, of their alacrity and superiority…and the same character being extant in the modern ones’.⁴² Corberon, who had heard it too, did not exaggerate when he wrote that ‘romantic ideas here are adopted with a fury’.⁴³ But the diplomats did not understand the significance of Potemkin’s ‘romantic ideas’ – his ‘Greek Project’ – that so excited Catherine. Serenissimus’ mind was not on London, Paris, Berlin or Philadelphia. It was on Tsargrad, the city of emperors – Constantinople. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was to be the dominating theme of the rest of his life and the foundation of his greatness.

Skip Notes

*1 Potemkin showed off many of Kingston’s treasures at his ball in 1791, described in Chapter 32. The Hermitage today, which holds much of the contents of Potemkin’s collections, is spotted with the former belongings of the Duchess of Kingston. Garnovsky was to be cursed for his avarice, for the Emperor Paul threw him into a debtor’s prison and he died poor in 1810.

*2 The Peacock Clock is one of the centrepieces of today’s Hermitage Museum. It still performs every hour on the hour.

*3 This now stands in the Menshikov Palace, part of the Hermitage, and is played at midday on Sundays. In its music, we can hear the sounds of Potemkin’s salon two centuries ago.

*4 There was a special Scottish relationship with Russia. The Scots often became Russianized. Empress Elisabeth’s Chancellor Bestuzhev was descended from a Scotsman named Best; Count Yakov Bruce was descended from Scots soldiers of fortune; Lermontov, the nineteenth-century poet, from a Learmond named ‘Thomas the Rhymer’.

*5 One Browne cousin was a field-marshal in the Austrian army, while George Browne joined Russian service, was captured by the Turks, sold thrice in Istanbul and then became governor of Livonia for most of Catherine the Great’s reign, dying in his nineties. Field-Marshal Count Lacey became Joseph II’s most trusted military adviser and correspondent, while another, Count Francis Antony Lacey, was Spanish Ambassador to Petersburg and Captain-General of all Catalonia.

*6 The British Cabinet Noir was much feared because it was based in George III’s Electorate of Hanover, a crossroads allowing it to intercept mail from all over Europe.

*7 Indeed, ‘travailler pour le roi de Prusse’ was a popular euphemism for ‘working without salary’.

*8 After Petersburg, Cagliostro toured Europe, causing a sensation everywhere, more like a pop star than a magus, but in Paris he became involved, through his patron the Cardinal de Rohan, in the Diamond Necklace Affair, the sting which so damaged Marie-Antoinette. Napoleon named it as one of the causes of the French Revolution. Cagliostro was actually found innocent in the trial that Marie-Antoinette so foolishly demanded and Louis XVI so rashly allowed, but he was ruined. He died a prisoner in 1795 in the Italian Papal fortress of San Leone.

*9 Stormont would have known that this was the positively imperial sum of two million francs. Louis XIV’s minister at the Hague offered the century’s most famous bribe to Marlborough in May 1709.

PART FIVE The Colossus