Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Throughout the fun, the Russian ministers and the diplomats were on edge as they sensed vast yet so far invisible changes. When the party returned to Petersburg, Joseph encountered Nikita Panin. ‘This man’, noticed the Kaiser, ‘has the air of fearing that one address oneself to his antagonist Prince Potemkin.’ By early July, the Prince himself was working between Emperor, Empress and the Austrian envoy, Cobenzl, on the beginning of a more formal relationship ‘to re-establish the old confidence and intimacy between the two courts’. Catherine could see the Emperor’s Janus-like personality, but, in the semi-public arena of her letters to Grimm, she declared his mind ‘the most solid, most profound and most intelligent’ she knew. By the time he left, the sides were closer, but nothing was decided. Maria Theresa still reigned in Vienna.¹²

After Joseph’s departure, in the midst of the bidding for Russian alliance from Austria, Prussia and Britain, Daria, Potemkin’s estranged mother, died in Moscow. When the Empress heard, she was on her way to Tsarskoe Selo and the Prince was at his nearby summer residence, Ozerki. Catherine insisted on telling him herself, so she changed route and joined him. The loss of a distant parent is often more painful than that of a close one: Potemkin wept copiously because ‘this prince’, observed Corberon, ‘combines the qualities and faults of sensitivitéé’.¹³ There was an understatement.

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Joseph’s successful visit truly put the cat among the pigeons. The Prussian party, Panin and Grand Duke Paul, were in disarray. Frederick the Great decided to send a Prussian prince to Petersburg to counteract the Habsburg success. Well before the Mogilev meeting, his envoy Goertz had been discussing such a visit with Potemkin and Panin. Instead of Prince Henry, who now knew Potemkin well, Frederick sent his nephew and heir, Frederick William. This was not a good idea. Joseph, for all his pedantry, was an impressive companion, but Frederick William, who had special instructions from the King to flatter Potemkin, was an oafish and stout Prussian boor without any redeeming social qualities. Prince Henry dutifully wrote to Potemkin asking him to welcome the uncouth nephew – in the tone of a man who reluctantly sends a cheap present but apologizes in advance for its disappointing quality.^*

Potemkin and Panin welcomed the Prince of Prussia together on 26 August. However, Potemkin pointedly decreed that Alexandra Engelhardt would ‘not give him a supper’,¹⁴ and Catherine nicknamed the ‘heavy, reserved and awkward’ Prussian, ‘Fat Gu’. The Hohenzollern was soon boring the entire capital except for the Grand Duke, who was so impressed with Frederick the Great and his military drill that any Prussian prince would do. Besides, Frederick’s plan had already been undermined by the arrival of Joseph II’s secret weapon – the Prince de Ligne.¹⁵

Corberon and Goertz convinced themselves, with wishful thinking, that nothing would come of Joseph’s visit. However, the Frenchman then went to dinner with the Cobenzls ‘and the new arrivals, the Prince de Ligne and his son’. Corberon dismissed this ‘grand seigneur of Flanders’ as an ‘amiable roué’, but he was much more than that.

Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, now fifty, was an eternally boyish, mischievous and effortlessly witty aristocrat of the Enlightenment. Heir to an imperial principality awarded in 1602, he was raised by a nurse who made him dance and sleep naked with her. He married a Liechtenstein heiress but found marriage ‘absurd for several weeks and then indifferent’. After three weeks, he committed his first infidelity with a chambermaid. He led his Ligne regiment during the Seven Years War, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Kolin. ‘I’d like to be a pretty girl until thirty, a general…till sixty,’ he told Frederick the Great after the war, ‘and then a cardinal until eighty.’ However, he was eaten by bitterness about one thing – he longed to be taken seriously as a general yet no one, from Joseph to Potemkin, would ever give him an independent military command. This rankled.¹⁶

Ligne’s greatest talent was for friendship. The charmer of Europe treated every day as a comedy waiting to be turned into an epigram, every girl as an adventure waiting to be turned into a poem, and every monarch as a conquest waiting to be seduced by his jesting. His flattery could be positively emetic: ‘What a low and brazen sycophant Ligne is!’, wrote one who observed him in action. But it worked. Friends with both Joseph II and Frederick the Great, no mean feat in itself, as well as with Rousseau, Voltaire, Casanova and Queen Marie-Antoinette, he showed how small the monde was in those days. No one so personified the debauched cosmopolitanism of the late eighteenth century: ‘I like to be a foreigner everywhere…A Frenchman in Austria, an Austrian in France, both a Frenchman and an Austrian in Russia.’