Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The treaty remained secret. It was 25 June, a month later, before Harris first suspected that a treaty had been signed, thanks to a bribe of £1,600 to Bezborodko’s secretary, but amazingly the secret was kept for almost two years. Only Catherine, Potemkin and Bezborodko knew everything; Grand Duke Paul was not told. Panin withdrew to his Smolensk estates.²⁸ The partners congratulated each other. Catherine saw herself and Potemkin as the mythical best friends of the Classical world – Pylades and Orestes. ‘My old Pylades’, she congratulated him, ‘is a clever man.’

However, they now faced a challenge from Grand Duke Paul, who was profoundly sceptical about southern expansion and Austrian alliance. Aping his father, he remained a ‘Prussian’. In July, when Catherine invited the British doctor Baron Dimsdale, with his wife, to inoculate the young Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine against smallpox, Nikita Panin demanded the right to come back and supervise, a trick he had arranged with Paul. ‘If he thinks ever to be reinstated in his post of First Minister,’ Catherine snapped, ‘he is greatly deceived. He’ll never be anything in my Court other than a sick-nurse.’

Catherine and Potemkin must have discussed how to protect their policy from Paul and, if possible, convert him to the Austrian cause. Why not send him and his wife on a Grand Tour to Vienna and Paris, avoiding old Frederick the Great in Berlin? If Catherine suggested it, the nervous Paul would regard it as a trick by Potemkin to remove him. Serenissmus was arranging the creation of his own kingdom, founding his first cities on the Black Sea and planning his nieces’ marriages. Paul could not be allowed to derail any of these schemes. Potemkin devised a solution.²⁹

Skip Notes

* Even Frederick the Great called him ‘a cloud of boredom and distaste.’

16

  THREE MARRIAGES AND A CROWN

Or midst a lovely little orchard

An arbour, where a fountain plays

A sweet-voiced harp within my hearing

My thoughts ensnares for divers pleasures,

First wearies and then awakens my blood;

Reclining on a velvet divan,

A maiden’s tender feelings coddling

I fill her youthful heart with love.

Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

Soon after the Austrian treaty was signed, Catherine put her consort’s plan into practice. She persuaded Prince Repnin, Panin’s nephew, to propose the Austrian trip to Paul, as if it came to from himself. Paul swallowed the bait and begged the Empress to let him go. After pretending to be reluctant, Catherine agreed – but she also worried about the inevitable blunders of her bitter, unstable son. ‘I dare to implore the indulgence of Your Imperial Majesty’, she asked Joseph, ‘for the…inexperience of youth.’ Joseph sent the invitation. Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were excited. They were even polite to Potemkin, who in his turn praised the Heir to everyone.¹

Panin had heard about this plan. ‘The old trickster’ no longer cared to conceal his sourness. He hurried back to Petersburg and stirred up Paul’s fears that the journey was a plot. Such trips could be dangerous for Russian princes: no one could forget that Peter the Great’s son Alexei was brought back from Vienna and tortured to death. All this was real to a tsarevich whose father had been murdered by his mother and who could trust few. Panin suggested that Berlin would be a better idea than Vienna – and then hinted that Paul would not only be excluded from the succession and possibly murdered but that his children would be taken from him. Paul became hysterical.

At Tsarskoe Selo next morning, Sunday, 13 September, the Grand Duke and Duchess, both in a state of panic, refused to travel. They partly blamed the need to remain with the children after their inoculation. Catherine brought in Doctors Rogerson and Dimsdale to reassure them. The Court was in uproar for three days and the diplomats analysed how the Heir was undermining the Austrian rapprochement, defying the Empress and her Prince. Potemkin was so ‘perplexed, irresolute and even despondent’ that he even considered letting Paul visit the wily fox of Berlin. Harris, who was with him in his apartments that Friday and believed the Austrian alliance gave Britain renewed hope, warned him that such weakness could bring him down. Potemkin paced up and down the room, ‘as in his manner’, without saying anything, and then bounded off to see the Empress. Catherine was no Peter the Great, but the refusal of Paul to obey her orders would have caused a serious succession crisis. The partners resolved to force Paul to go. When Potemkin rejoined Harris an hour later, everything was settled.