Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The departure was a little tragedy of the life of royal families, played out in front of the Court, Paul’s entourage, and scores of horses and serfs. On 19 September, the Heir, travelling incognito as Comte du Nord, and his wife kissed their children goodbye. The Grand Duchess fainted away and was actually carried unconscious to the carriage. The Grand Duke followed his wife with an expression of abject terror. The Empress and her big guns, Potemkin, Prince Orlov and the traitorous Count Panin, bid him goodbye. As he climbed grimly into the carriage, Paul whispered something to Panin, who did not answer.

The Heir pulled down the blinds and ordered the coachman to drive away fast. The next morning, Panin was dismissed.²

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Serenissimus, savouring his political victory, was arranging the marriages of both of his single mistress–nieces, Sashenka and Katinka. On 10 November 1781, Katinka ‘the Venus’ – Ekaterina Engelhardt, with whom half the Court, including at various times both Catherine’s sons, Paul and Bobrinsky, were in love – married the sickly but rich Count Pavel Martynovich Skavronsky, in the Palace Chapel. Descended from the Livonian brother of Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine I, Skavronsky was a sublime eccentric. Brought up in Italy, which he regarded as home, he suited Potemkin because he was a tolerant buffoon obsessed with music – a melomaniac who composed and gave concerts though he had no talent for music whatsoever. His servants were forbidden to talk and could only communicate in recitative. He gave all his orders in music and his visitors made conversation in the form of vocal improvisations. His singing dinner parties, ornamented by the sleepy coquettish Katinka, must have been zany.³ Catherine had misgivings about Skavronsky’s ability to please a woman – ‘he’s a bit silly and clumsy’, she thought, adding that she only cared because it was an issue that was ‘close to us’, meaning she regarded Potemkin’s nieces as semi-family. The Prince disagreed – Skavronsky’s weakness and wealth suited him.⁴

Two days later, Sashenka married her uncle’s Polish ally, Grand Hetman (or Grand General) of the Polish Crown, Ksawery Branicki, aged forty-nine, a good-natured, self-made and ambitious ruffian who had made his career as King Stanislas-Augustus’ hard man. He was what Casanova called a dim but swashbuckling ‘Polish bravo’. Casanova duelled with Branicki in Warsaw for insulting his mistress, an Italian actress called La Binetti. Both were wounded – Branicki seriously – but became friends.⁵ When Ségur passed through Warsaw, Branicki appeared in his room in traditional Polish costume – red boots, brown robe, fur hat and sabre – and said, ‘Here are two companions for your journey,’ giving him two bejewelled pistols.⁶

Branicki had fallen out with the King of Poland and, seeing his future as a Russian ally, found a kindred spirit in Serenissimus. They first met in Petersburg in 1775 and Branicki had been currying favour ever since, working for Potemkin in Poland. On 27 March that year, he wrote to tell ‘my dear General’ that ‘Poland has chosen me’ to deliver the news that Potemkin had received the certificate of indigenat or Polish noble status, the first step in his long game to become either duke of Courland or king of Poland, his escape route should Catherine die.⁷ Branicki’s marriage to his niece was obviously designed to be Potemkin’s family bridgehead in Poland.⁸

The Empress supervised Alexandra’s wedding to the ‘Polish bravo’. The bride was taken to Catherine’s rooms that morning and ‘very richly dressed in some of the Empress’s jewels, put on by her own hands’. We have a description of a similar wedding of one of the Empress’s closest maids-of-honour, Lev Naryshkin’s daughter: ‘This lady’s dress was an Italian nightgown of a white silver tissue with hanging sleeves…and a very large hoop.’ The bride dined with the Empress. In church, the bride stood on ‘a piece of brocaded sea-green silk’. The couple held candles as crowns were held over their heads according to Orthodox tradition. They exchanged rings and the priest took a ‘piece of silk 2 or 3 yards long and tied their hands together’. Once the wedding was over there was a feast, after which the bride returned the Empress’s jewels and received 5,000 roubles.⁹

At almost the same time, the fourth sister, ‘hopeless’ Nadezhda who had married Colonel P.A. Ismailov less splendidly in 1779, lost her husband and then married an ally of Potemkin’s, Senator P.A. Shepilev. The last niece, Tatiana, married her distant cousin Lieutenant-General Mikhail Sergeievich Potemkin, who was twenty-five years older than her, in 1785. Serenissimus nicknamed him ‘Saint’ for his good nature, and their marriage was happy until his early death.¹⁰

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