Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

All accounts agree on the way he met Catherine but differ on the detail: was it the dragonne or the upright plumage for a hat, a sultane?² What mattered for the superstitious Potemkin was the way the horse would not leave the imperial side, as if the beast sensed their joint destiny: this ‘happy chance’, he called it.³ But it was not chance that had made him gallop up to offer his dragonne. Knowing Potemkin’s artifice, love of play-acting and fine horsemanship, it is quite possible that it was not the horse that delayed his return to the ranks. Either way, it now obeyed its rider and galloped back to his place.

The long column of men, marching around two mounted women in male uniforms, set out into the light night. Military bands played; the men sang marching songs. Sometimes they whistled and shouted: ‘Long live our little mother Catherine!’

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At 3 a.m., Catherine’s column stopped at Krasni-Kabak to rest. She lay down on a narrow, straw bed beside Dashkova, but she did not sleep. The Orlovs pushed ahead with their vanguard. The main body set off again two hours later and were met by the Vice-Chancellor, Prince A. M. Golitsyn, with another offer from Peter. But there was nothing to negotiate except unconditional abdication. The Vice-Chancellor took the oath to Catherine.

Soon the news arrived that Alexei Orlov had taken peaceful possession of the two summer estates, Oranienbaum and Peterhof. At 10 a.m., Peterhof received Catherine as sovereign empress: it was only twenty-four hours since she had left in her lace nightcap. Her lover Grigory Orlov, accompanied by Potemkin, was already at nearby Oranienbaum forcing Peter to sign the unconditional abdication.⁴ When the name was on the paper, Grigory Orlov brought it back to the Empress. Potemkin remained behind to guard this husk of an emperor.⁵ A disgusted Frederick the Great, for whom it might be said that Peter III had sacrificed his Empire, remarked that the Emperor ‘let himself be driven from the throne as a child is sent to bed’.⁶

The ex-Emperor was guided into his carriage accompanied by his mistress and two aides. The carriage was surrounded by a guard. Potemkin was among them. The milling troops taunted the convoy with hurrahs of ‘Long live the Empress Catherine the Second.’⁷ At Peterhof, Peter handed over his sword, his ribbon of St Andrew and his Preobrazhensky Guards uniform. He was taken to a room he knew well, where Panin visited him: the ex-Tsar fell to his knees and begged not to be separated from his mistress. When this was refused, an exhausted, weeping Peter asked if he could take his fiddle, his negro Narcissus and his dog Mopsy. ‘I consider it one of the great misfortunes of my life that I had to see Peter at that moment,’ Panin remembered later, ‘the greatest misfortune of my life.’⁸

Before he could be taken to his permanent home at Schlüsselburg, a closed Berline carriage with guards on the running-boards, commanded by Alexei Orlov, transferred the ex-Emperor to his estate at Ropsha (about nineteen miles inland). Potemkin is not mentioned among this guard, but he was there days later, so he was probably present. Catherine granted her husband his fiddle, blackamoor – and dog.⁹ She never saw Peter again.

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A few days later, Princess Dashkova entered Catherine’s cabinet and was ‘astonished’ to see Grigory Orlov ‘stretched at full length on a sofa’ going through the state papers. ‘I asked what he was about. “The Empress has ordered that I open them,” he replied.’ The new regime was in power.¹⁰

Catherine II arrived back in the jubilant capital on 30 June. Now she had won, she had to pay for her victory. Potemkin was among the beneficiaries specified by the Empress herself: no doubt she remembered the sword-knot. The cost was over a million roubles in a total annual budget of only sixteen million. Her supporters received generous rewards for their roles in the coup: St Petersburg’s garrison were given half a year’s salary – a total of 225,890 roubles. Grigory Orlov was promised 50,000 roubles; Panin and Razumovsky got pensions of 5,000 roubles. On 9 August, Grigory and Alexei Orlov, Ekaterina Dashkova and the seventeen leading plotters received either 800 souls or 24,000 roubles each.