Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Ligne’s letters were copied, his bons mots repeated, across the salons of Europe – as they were meant to be. He was a superb writer whose bitchy portraits of the great men of his time, especially Potemkin, who fascinated him, were never bettered. His Mélanges are, along with Casanova’s Histoire, the best record of the era: Ligne was at the top and Casanova at the bottom of the same faro society. They met the same charlatans and dukes, prostitutes and countesses at balls and card tables, operas and bordellos, roadside taverns and royal courts, again and again, across Europe.

Ligne entranced Potemkin. Their friendship, bringing together two of the best conversationalists of the age, would wax and wane with the intensity of a love affair, chronicled in Ligne’s many unpublished letters contained in Potemkin’s archives, written in his tiny hand but dripping with wit and intelligence before sinking again into illegibility. This ‘jockey diplomatique’, as he called himself, was invited to all the Empress’s private card games, carriage rides and dinners at Tsarskoe Selo. The bovine Prince of Prussia did not stand a chance against the man Catherine called ‘the most pleasant and easy person to live with I’ve ever known, an original mind that thinks deeply and plays all sorts of tricks, like a child’.

Grand Duke Paul alone took trouble with Frederick William, which only served to alienate him from Catherine and Potemkin all the more. When the Empress gave a spectacle, ball and supper at the Hermitage Theatre in the Prince of Prussia’s honour, the Grand Ducal couple accompanied the guest but Catherine sighed to Harris, ‘I want you to defend me from boors,’ and did not bother to attend the show. Diplomats wondered where the Empress had gone. It turned out she was playing billiards with Potemkin and Ligne.¹⁷

Empress and Serenissimus were relieved when Frederick William finally departed, having achieved nothing. He had noticed the cold shoulder: as king, he would take his revenge. But the Russians almost refused to let Ligne go. Ever the gentleman, the ‘jockey diplomatique’ stayed a little longer. Finally, in October, he insisted, so Potemkin went with him to show off one of his regiments and only let him leave with a deluge of presents – horses, serfs and a box encrusted with diamonds. Potemkin missed Ligne and kept asking Cobenzl when he was returning.

This was exactly what the Austrians wanted. They fired a barrage of compliments at Potemkin: in a little illustration of the lubricious nature of diplomatic flattery, Cobenzl asked his Emperor to mention Potemkin favourably in as many of his en clair despatches as possible. The Russian, he flattered Joseph in turn, rated a word from the Kaiser more highly than anything from the Kings of Prussia or Sweden. But the direct compliments of the Emperor should be saved for special occasions. And Joseph should also send regards to the Engelhardt nieces.¹⁸

On 17/28 November 1780, Joseph was liberated from the sensible restraints of Maria Theresa. Her death, after a reign of forty years, gave Joseph the chance almost to ruin the Habsburg legacy in a way that even Frederick of Prussia could not have imagined. In the lugubrious letters of sorrow that passed between Vienna and Petersburg, the grins were only just concealed behind the grief. ‘The Emperor’, Ligne joked to Potemkin on 25 November, only a week after her death, ‘seemed to me so profoundly filled with friendship for you…that I have had real pleasure to remonstrate with him on your account in all regards…Have me told from time to time that you haven’t forgotten me…’.¹⁹ There was no question of that.

When the Empress–Queen’s body was laid in the Kaisergruft – imperial vault – of Vienna’s Capucin Church, Joseph knew he could embark on his rapprochement with Russia. Potemkin declared both his ‘keenness’ and ‘seriousness’ to Cobenzl. Catherine made sure that all the details went directly to her and not to Panin, ‘that old trickster’, as she called him to Potemkin.²⁰ Catherine and Joseph turned their attention to the coming struggle against the Sultan.

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